{"id":275539,"date":"2026-05-01T19:45:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-02T00:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/ralentir-la-cadence-de-lexperience-museale-grace-au-toucher\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T07:46:02","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T12:46:02","slug":"decelerating-museological-experience-through-touch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/decelerating-museological-experience-through-touch\/","title":{"rendered":"Decelerating Museological Experience Through Touch"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Toronto-based artist Kyungmin Kate Lee and Cambridge-based artist Olivia Brouwer have produced radical bodies of work that unsettle ocularcentrism in museums and galleries. They speak knowingly about the exigent demand for accessibility by Blind and low-vision audiences, and they detail how aesthetics, programming, and design can integrate tangible strategies for accommodation. In questioning the kinds of ableism embedded within cultural institutions, they reconfigure curatorial paradigms and generate important conversations about crip rights, disability, and social marginalization. Both decelerate <\/em>the museological experience of time and duration by emphasizing the urgency of touch, thus positioning slowness as a neglected yet critical mode of understanding. By foregrounding embodied intimacy, they suggest alternative frameworks for multisensory communication and, in doing so, open up new spaces for imagining more inclusive futures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Having limited vision in her right optic nerve shifted Lee\u2019s art practice from photography to three-dimensional, multisensory forms of presentation. She was born in South Korea, and her sculptural works often intersect with autobiographical subject matter, including her diasporic identity and immigrant experience. In the multimedia series Seen and Unseen<\/em> (2023\u201325), she sought inspiration in Sophie Calle\u2019s memorable work The Blind<\/em> (1986), in which Calle interviewed residents of an institute for the Blind in Paris and recorded their singular concepts of beauty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calle later visualized the project through a series of photographic portraits accompanied by interview excerpts and images of the various things the respondents deemed beautiful. But her work did little to encourage critical access and, in fact, can be said to exploit the Blind experience by remaking it into a purely aesthetic expression. However, Lee identifies in Calle\u2019s ocularcentrism ample room to introduce competing sensory hierarchies and forms of haptic knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In Western epistemology, ocularcentrism positions vision as the primary and most reliable avenue to the accumulation of knowledge. Objective truth is not commonly bound up in a collection of sensory readings but still relies heavily on visual observation, therefore shaping culture\u2019s conception of lived reality. However, the cultural dominance of sight is often severely limiting, misleading, or illusory, as phenomenological interpretation and other forms of embodied knowledge also markedly shape how society mediates perception and produces meaning. For instance, following the premise that sight is not equivalent to knowledge, Lee translated the sentence \u201cI am Korean Canadian\u201d into Braille for works such as Transcendence III<\/em> (2025), representing each character through six one-centimeter wooden modules mounted on panels. Through constant repetition, the words \u201cI am Korean Canadian\u201d metamorphosed into a kind of mantra that serves to reinforce a deepening sense of home and belonging. It also transforms her immigration experience from one rendered unseen by hegemonic social systems in Canada into one made visible and seen\u200a\u2014\u200ahence the layered complexity of the series\u2019s title Seen and Unseen<\/em>. For those who lack context or familiarity with the Braille system, touching and feeling the cubic lettering in the work is naturally disorienting; yet, in an unexpected way, it is somewhat like holding a song in your hand. As the fingers gradually move across the surface of the panels, they sense rhythms, patterns, and punctuations in Lee\u2019s repeating mantra that are strikingly similar to musical structures. In this way, touch can be experienced as sound.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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\"A
Kyungmin Kate Lee<\/strong>
Transcendence I<\/em>, 2024, installation view, Museum of Dufferin, Mulmur, 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

By investigating her cultural identity and unfolding lived experience, Lee effectively turns \u201clanguage into something that must be touched.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Kyungmin Kate Lee, email message to the author, November 11, 2025.<\/span> In Transcendence II (Self-Rewriting)<\/em> (2025), she renders the phrase \u201cStriving Towards settling in life\u201d on two fabricated cubes that stand on their corners. She purposely commits a cardinal sin in the museum or gallery context by promoting physical contact with the artworks. But the sensorial gradations of movement, pressure, and texture on the fingers and hands carry heavy epistemological consequences, reconfiguring what it means to really \u201csee\u201d an artwork beyond the primacy of sight. To run one\u2019s hands over the cube is to activate bodily movement\u200a\u2014\u200abending, crouching, twisting, or leaning\u200a\u2014\u200ain response to it, often as one circles the work and responds to its spatial proximity. As visitors read the work by feeling its form, Lee\u2019s sculpture elongates time\u200a\u2014\u200aeven suspends it\u200a\u2014\u200aisolating it from conventional paradigms of museological experience in an attempt to elicit experiences of proprioceptive awareness, mindfulness, and rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kyungmin Kate Lee<\/strong>
Transcendence III<\/em>, installation view, Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts, 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Kyungmin Kate Lee<\/strong>
Transcendence III<\/em> (detail), Richmond Hill Centre for the Performing Arts, 2025.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Lee also aims to decelerate museological experiences by combating what she calls \u201cquick visual consumption.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Lee, email message to the author.<\/span> Our culture\u2019s compulsion toward spectacle and instantaneous media prompts Lee to call for a calculated retreat from its exhausting tempo. The experiences of slow, rhythmic viewing that she constructs for those who engage with her touch-based works in Seen and Unseen<\/em> are reflective of \u201ccrip time,\u201d a perceptual restructuring of ableist worldviews that historically approach time and duration as linear experiences. In crip time, the unrelenting rush toward productivity and progress is wholly interrupted, making room for bodies and minds that have been marginalized by the ceaseless demands of late-stage capitalism.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Critical Disability Studies Collective, \u201cTerminology,\u201d University of Minnesota (website), February 20, 2026, accessible online.<\/span> Ultimately, Lee\u2019s embrace of the perceptual fluidity of time and embodied intimacy shifts the conventional, ableist experience of chronology in museums and galleries, marking such spaces as antagonistic to the dominant social order.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Lee, Brouwer keenly proposes that the elevated status of sight in museum and gallery spaces be overhauled to focus instead on the textures of language, which can both inform and cultivate generative modes of understanding.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - See Simon Hayhoe, \u201cBlind Visitor Experiences at Art Museums,\u201d in Sensing Culture Conference<\/em>, London, UK (April 30, 2018), 16, 28; see also Patr\u00edcia Roque Martins, \u201cBlindness in Art Museums: A Portuguese Case Study,\u201d Journal of Museum Education <\/em>45, no. 3 (September 2020): 341.<\/span> Early in her practice, Brouwer staged temporary experiences of blindness as a means of stimulating the universal language of empathy and understanding in sighted audiences. These efforts were largely motivated by her own experience of living with partial blindness in one eye after a rare viral infection permanently damaged her retina. Since 2020, and the events surrounding the global pandemic, she has shifted her practice to include multisensory media installations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"A
Olivia Brouwer<\/strong>
Out of Body (Inkblot Soundscape)<\/em>, 2022-2023, installation view, Tangled Art + Disability, Toronto, 2023.
Photo: Felicia Byron Photography, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Through the incorporation of embossed surfaces, physical vibration, and layered audio recordings, Brouwer\u2019s recent body of work presents an expanded field of critical accessibility, emphasizing what she deems \u201cimmersive encounters\u201d for Blind, low-vision, and sighted audiences.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Olivia Brouwer, email message to the author, November 7, 2025.<\/span> Take, for example, Soft-Spoken<\/em> (2020\u201322), a poignant series of seven canvases embossed with Braille lettering derived from interviews with Blind or low-vision friends, colleagues, or acquaintances on their experience of vision impairment. Although Soft-Spoken<\/em> may harken back to Calle\u2019s project, it departs from it in many ways. For one, the canvases are coupled with an audio recording of the interviews that is accessible by pressing a button located beside each canvas. For non-readers of Braille, the act of passing their fingertips over the embossed acrylic paint as they listen to the audio recording is akin to touching the interviewee\u2019s words. Not only does this necessitate a haptic activation of the work, but it also enables audiences to hear the interviewees narrate their deeply private experiences of living with disability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Calle\u2019s work, which enacts asymmetrical power dynamics, Brouwer affirms the agency and lived experience of the participants to stage possibilities for empathy that exceed visual frameworks. By attending to the daily challenges of those living with disability, Brouwer enacts a deeper understanding of the audience\u2019s own positionality within a culture that strongly benefits able-bodiedness. Moreover, the potential of haptic mobilization to close the metaphorical distance between disabled interviewees and able-bodied audiences foregrounds an ethics of care and relationality that extends across time and space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Expanding the field of critically accessible, inclusionary curation involves the deceleration of museological experience through haptic language. Whereas visual consumption is rapid, touch is slow, methodical, embodied.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Olivia Brouwer<\/strong>
Soft-Spoken (a series of conversations with Eric Bourgeois, Kelly Greenaway, Jess Hannigan, Kristin Hay, Andrew Joldersma, Tara McFadyen, and Tim Peters)<\/em>, from the series Soft-Spoken<\/em>, 2020-2022, installation views, Tangled Art + Disability, Toronto, 2023.
Photos: Felicia Byron Photography, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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\"On<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

By decentring visual authority through touch, Lee and Brouwer stage opportunities to unwind the hurried dynamics of spectatorship in museums and galleries. The stories harboured within the artworks can be communicated in new and novel dimensions when experienced through haptic sensation, holding vital implications for cultural memory, audience interaction, and relationality. These developments contribute to a necessary reassembling of curated spaces in which sight finds balance alongside the breadth of other senses, which some scientists now estimate to number twenty or more.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Stark Science Learning Center, \u201cThe Twenty Senses,\u201d University of Utah (website), February 20, 2026, accessible online.<\/span> These recent discoveries further fracture established sensory hierarchies, opening new possibilities for examining the tangled relationship between the body and its perceptual capacities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Museums and galleries can lead through their actions both inside and outside their walls, thereby conditioning progressive policies that comprehensively impact Blind and low-vision audiences. It is our responsibility as curators to \u201cadvocate for a politics of access,\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - Amanda Cachia, \u201cReflections on Access: Disability in Curatorial Practice,\u201d Canadian Journal of Disability Studies<\/em> 8, no. 1 (2019): 116.<\/span> in the resonant words of Amanda Cachia, that decentres ableist worldviews by advancing progressive, alternative possibilities. It is not, nor will it ever be, enough to simply present the work of Blind or low-vision artists as a legitimate expression of radically accessible curatorial practice. Lee\u2019s and Brouwer\u2019s work and exhaustless advocacy provide enough evidence to support this. What is required now is a dynamic collaboration between sighted, Blind, and low-vision audiences so that we can better understand the entry points for serious change together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Exhibition spaces are overwhelmingly structured toward sighted audiences and condition an ableist experience of\u00a0art. The architectural design and curatorial programming of museums and galleries do not exist in a\u00a0vacuum but are instead an extension of a larger society that privileges sight in a rigid hierarchy of senses. Not only does this perpetuate crucial barriers to entry for Blind and low\u2011vision audiences, which stymie active social participation\u00a0and independence, but it also works against the need for critical accessibility that most cultural institutions hold as\u00a0a\u00a0core [NOTE count=1]value.[\/NOTE][REF count=1]Whereas critical disability theory emphasizes how disability is primarily constructed through social dynamics, critical accessibility theory frames access as an ethical question, investigating how institutions condition and structure barriers to entry.[\/REF]<\/br>","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":275516,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[],"numeros":[8014],"disciplines":[],"statuts":[],"checklist":[],"auteurs":[964],"artistes":[8076,8040],"thematiques":[],"type_post":[],"class_list":["post-275539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-post","numeros-117-crip","auteurs-matthew-ryan-smith-en","artistes-kyungmin-kate-lee-en","artistes-olivia-brouwer-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275539"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275543,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275539\/revisions\/275543"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275539"},{"taxonomy":"numeros","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/numeros?post=275539"},{"taxonomy":"disciplines","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/disciplines?post=275539"},{"taxonomy":"statuts","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/statuts?post=275539"},{"taxonomy":"checklist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/checklist?post=275539"},{"taxonomy":"auteurs","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/auteurs?post=275539"},{"taxonomy":"artistes","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artistes?post=275539"},{"taxonomy":"thematiques","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/thematiques?post=275539"},{"taxonomy":"type_post","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esse.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/type_post?post=275539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}