What if My Body is a Beacon for the World?

What if My Body is a Beacon for the World? (January 9 – 26, 2025) underlies the questions Adam Wolfond, a Toronto-based non-speaking autistic poet and artist, asks about neurodiverse differences in perception, contemplating the diversity of autistic people and their ways of living in the world.

Curated by David Liss, this exhibition is organized around a new video installation, which uses endoscopic and body cameras to show the viewer what Wolfond sees and experiences. Wolfond, in collaboration with other speaking and non-speaking neurodivergent thinkers, produces visual questions that, often literally, turn the more dominant neurotypical world upside down, where perception, direction, and form are prescribed.

The installation brings us closer to a mobile dance of perception, honing in on detail and fractalizing space and time. This poetic dance of relation foregrounds what many others background in busy contemporary life: attention to the liminal. In this exhibition Wolfond rethinks “crip time” and the ways the autistic life lives intensively in relation with the human and more-than-human.

Adam Wolfond’s work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine (2023), and he has published two books, The Wanting Way (2022), and Open Book in The Way of Water (2023). He is also the co-founder of dis assembly alongside his mother Estée Klar, an artist and filmmaker who holds a PhD in Critical Disability Studies from York University.

For media inquiries please contact Laura Chapnick-Klein lchapnick@kofflerarts.org.

This video installation project is made possible by the Toronto Arts Council.