Disability, community and interdisciplinarity are the focus points of this exhibition, which explores how different artists affected by access barriers communicate and create art. Rather than offering fixed answers, In Conversation invites reflection: What does an art exhibition look like when it involves communities with varied perspectives on disability? How do they creatively and critically respond to societal barriers? How do they navigate interdisciplinary collaboration across a diversity of access needs and desires?

In Conversation embraces a discursive, process-driven methodology and welcomes open-ended outcomes. It features collaborative works created by Jay Afrisando and members of his communities through individual conversations, group discussions, and workshops. Collaborators include diverse artists (in a broader perspective) – some living with disabilities, while others do not identify as disabled yet experience systematic and physical challenges.

The resulting artworks showcase short films, installations, physical games which can be played in the gallery, and live performances. They interweave sound, visual, tactile, and psychological experiences rooted in a collaborative creative process centering Crip Time. The result are artworks that evolve organically, growing patiently and surely through biological time, like plants. This process emphasizes collective intelligence as a generative force, shifting the role of the artist from individual author to attentive facilitator. Arriving at an important moment in Berlin, when the city’s cultural landscape is under threat, the exhibition provides a platform for the exchange of new and innovative ideas between crip and other marginalised artists working in the Berlin art scene and beyond.

Jay Afrisando is a neurodivergent composer, multimedia artist, researcher, and educator. He works on aural diversity, disability, accessibility, and decolonizing arts, manifested in music-theater, film, installation, witty storytelling, and other genre-bending experiences.

His works have been presented through solo exhibition (Curb Appeal Gallery, US, 2023), institutional exhibition (UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences, US, 2024), group exhibitions (ARTJOG, ID, 2024; Sound Scene at the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, US, 2023 & 2022), performances and screenings (daadgalerie, DE, 2025; TanzFaktur, DE, 2024; Constellations Chicago, US, 2024; HERE Arts Center, US, 2023; Zeitgeist’s SOUNDING GROUND, US, 2023; ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts, BE, 2021; Walker Art Center, US, 2021), and artistic workshop and accessible podcast (Refuge Worldwide, DE, 2025). He has collaborated with curators (Dr. Rachel Nelson, Sandy Guttman, Ignatia Nilu) and artists and culture bearers (Saverio Cantoni, Simone Goldschmidt-Lechner, thingNY, Third Coast Percussion, Zeitgeist, Andy Slater, Jamil Haque, and Gelsey Bell, among many). He has been awarded the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin 2024 and the MAP Fund 2023, and was recently awarded the Young Artist Award 2024 by ARTJOG for his short film on sign language and voice, Aural Architecture.