Tate Liverpool Joins UK’s Largest Ever Showcase of Disabled Artists

On 2 July, Tate Liverpool will join 29 museums and galleries across the UK to host We Are Invisible We Are Visible (WAIWAV), presented by DASH, the disabled-led visual arts organisation. 

Alistair Gentry will be creating work in the galleries modifying reproductions of pictures in the Tate collection to highlight the absence of representation of the disabled population within art.

Titled 25% Rectification, Gentry’s intervention references the fact that nearly a quarter of people in the UK identify as disabled, neurodivergent or D/deaf, but we also don’t see them as subjects of art a quarter of the time. Gentry will perform his rectifications on reproductions of iconic works in the Tate collection, adding items such as hearing aids, wheelchairs, prosthetics, guide dogs and medication.

The event is free with the opportunity to drop in throughout the day at Tate Liverpool to see Gentry creating his artistic interventions on works such as Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss 1901–4 and William Hogarth’s The Painter and his Pug 1745.

Ahead of the event, Alistair Gentry said: “In the spirit of Dada artists like Marcel Duchamp cheekily adding a moustache and beard to the Mona Lisa, I’m taking it upon myself to actively ‘correct’ the canon of Western art and make it more to my liking. I’m hoping this makes people think about all the types of people we don’t see represented in mainstream art as subjects or models.”

Gentry makes performance lectures, interventions, participatory experiences and live role-playing games, mainly for communities and audiences outside of conventional gallery, theatre or performance spaces.

His inspiration comes from folklore, magic, silly costumes, museums, absurdity, the uncanny valley, doing things that help people think, improving the world incrementally, and making machines and systems do things their makers wouldn’t approve of.

Gentry is a former artist in residence at The Open Data Institute (London), Pervasive Media Studio (Bristol), the ESRC Genomics Policy & Research Forum at the University of Edinburgh and The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. He has shown work at Folkestone Triennial, La Biennale di Venezia, Art on the Underground, London, Furtherfield, London, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and Abandon Normal Devices at FACT, Liverpool.

25% Rectification is part of WAIWAV which will see 31 d/Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent artists stage Dada-inspired interventions to mark the 102nd anniversary of the 1st Dada International Exhibition in Berlin. WAIWAV asks the question – what if the Dada movement had started in 2020 in lockdown? What would they have done? Is now a timely moment to resurrect the spirit and essence of Dada?

Alistair Gentry, 25% Rectification will be at Tate Liverpool on Saturday 2 July from 10am to 4pm.

For more information about Tate Liverpool visit https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-liverpool