This Agora session brings together three examples where artistic interventions have pushed past the singular sense of the visual in the visual arts to engage a world that people navigate using a diversity of sensory abilities. The panelists will discuss how museums and art institutions can increase accessibility by expanding how we think about sensory access to artistic creation. Mirjam Varadinis and her collaborators at the Kunsthaus Zurich will present their learnings from commissioning and realizing William Forsythe’s “The Sense of Things,” the first artistic intervention in the Kunsthaus Zürich’s new museum building, designed by David Chipper eld, encouraging visitors to discover the museum as a sounding body. The artist Amar Kanwar will discuss his work Such A Morning, 2017, a lm shot in India inspired by education in the “real world” that follows the mysterious disappearance of a famous mathematics professor who at the peak of his career, sequesters himself into physical darkness as he begins to slowly lose his eyesight. As he becomes acclimatized to the dark, the professor experiences a series of hallucinations and epiphanies about his life and his world that he documents as ‘Almanac of the Dark’. Annalisa Trasatti will present the work of the Museo Tattile Statale Omero in Ancona, Italy, a barrier-free museum, whose aim is to export its experience and philosophy by promoting a multi-sensory enjoyment of art.

Amar Kanwar, Artist

Annalisa Trasatti, Museo Tattile Statale Omero

Mirjam Varadinis, Kunsthaus Zürich