Caring and Harmful Practice
These lists have grown out of many conversations on our experiences from working with art institutions. Here they are presented in a condensed, non-conclusive format that is indented to be reflected upon and modified when applied within different groups, sensitivities and contexts.
Caring Practices
Communication, Planning, and Transparency
-Communicate clearly, directly, and try to avoid assumptions while still respecting different communication styles.
-Maintain open dialogue throughout the project, especially when needs, timelines, or circumstances change.
-Hold focused, well-structured meetings and provide clear planning from the outset.
-Be transparent about deadlines, budgets, expectations, and decision-making processes.
-Define roles, responsibilities, and expectations early in the collaboration.
-Share event structures, schedules, and presentation formats in advance.
-Create clear entry and exit processes for projects.
Access, Care, and Support
-Initiate conversations about access needs and accessibility at the beginning of a project, while allowing people to decide what personal information they wish to share.
-Read, acknowledge, and actively implement access and care riders.
-Provide practical accommodations that respond to stated needs, such as accessible facilities, reserved spaces, assistance with physical tasks, audio description, rest areas, and dietary requirements.
-Assign a designated contact person who can provide support when needed.
-Check in during periods of illness, fatigue, or acute symptoms.
-Allow flexibility in timelines and include buffers for illness or changing access needs.
-Give and inform people about sufficient time to complete tasks in ways that work for them. Collaboration and Working Relationships
-Foster trust through ongoing communication and collaboration.
-Encourage colleagues to remain open, adaptable, and willing to learn.
-Commit to conflict resolution and staying with discomfort. Do not ignore difficulty or blame the person who comment on or outlines a problem
-Do not shame people for having difficult feelings in difficult situations.
-Respect different communication styles, including fragmented, non-verbal, or less formally structured forms of expression.
-Value curiosity, active listening, and the ability to sit with uncertainty, discomfort, or silence.
-Support people without making assumptions about their abilities or limitations.
-Ensure people can participate without having to hide or justify their disability.
Fair Working Conditions
-Compensate all labour fairly, including preparation, consultation, administrative work, and additional tasks that arise during a project.
-Discuss and agree on any changes in scope before adding responsibilities.
-Provide practical support during intensive working periods, including access to food and rest.
-Offer editorial, technical, or production support when needed.
Recognition and Inclusion
-Credit all contributors appropriately and acknowledge the work of the entire team.
-Treat all participants as valued collaborators whose perspectives carry equal weight.
-Create culturally diverse environments where different experiences and ways of working are welcomed.
-Provide positive and constructive feedback.
Harmful Practices
Lack of Access and Care
-Failing to discuss accessibility, care, or support needs.
-Ignoring, dismissing, questioning, or minimizing stated access needs.
-Agreeing to accommodations and then failing to provide them.
-Expecting people to simply “make it work” without adequate support in prioritising tasks or communicate what an alternative “successful” outcome could be.
-Expecting individuals to simply “make it work” without adequate support.
-Treating access as optional despite receiving funding or resources intended for accessibility.
-Providing inaccessible environments, facilities, or working conditions.
Poor Communication and Accountability
-Lack of transparency around budgets, timelines, expectations, or decision-making.
-Changing deadlines, deliverables, or project scope without discussion.
-Not listening to concerns or responding defensively when needs are communicated.
-Shifting blame onto individuals when institutional failures or unmet access commitments create difficulties.
-Describing a space as “safe” without clearly defining what that means in practice.
Exploitation and Tokenism
-Asking people to do unpaid or underpaid work.
-Expanding responsibilities without additional compensation or consent.
-Using disabled, marginalised, or diverse participants primarily to satisfy funding requirements, representation goals, or institutional image- making.
-Seeking visibility, personal stories, or emotional labour without creating meaningful influence, support, or compensation.
-Treating people as projects rather than collaborators with agency.
Exclusion and Discrimination
-Excluding people from participation rather than adapting processes, formats, or environments.
-Making assumptions about what someone can or cannot do.
-Treating some voices, expertise, or opinions as less valuable than others.
-Pressuring individuals to perform a particular identity, persona, or category.
-Creating situations where people must continually educate others or prove the legitimacy of their experiences.
-Failing to believe or respect people’s descriptions of their own needs and limitations.
Ableist and Extractive Cultures
-Prioritising toughness, resilience, or endurance over care and sustainability.
-Focusing on individual trauma while ignoring the structural conditions that produce exclusion.
-Expecting disabled people to manage the discomfort, anxiety, or learning process of non-disabled people.
-Offering unsolicited health advice or questioning the legitimacy of disability or illness.
-Responding to feedback about past experiences by becoming defensive rather than listening and learning.
Lack of Recognition and Respect
-Failing to credit contributors for their work.
-Neglecting the expertise and labour involved in accessibility work.
-Forgetting, overlooking, or sidelining people in collaborative processes.
-Moving, changing, or making decisions about someone’s work, materials, or contribution without informing them.
-Showing less engagement with accessible formats and practices than with other areas of institutional work.
Toilet Access Mapping
Lacking Access Case Study Before I publicly spoke about my hidden disability and life with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), and before Access Riders became part of my artistic practice, I often found myself negotiating access indirectly. Asking for accommodation near a toilet could feel easier than explaining my condition. Yet these negotiations frequently revealed how inaccessible supposedly supportive environments could be, and how easily access needs are misunderstood when they are not explicitly named. What appeared to be a simple request often exposed different assumptions about urgency, distance, privacy, and what accessibility actually means in practice. The ‘Toilet Access Map’ is a speculative mapping exercise developed from the perspective of an artist living with IBD. It serves as a conversation tool between artists and venues that may not yet know each other’s access needs. By sharing floor plans before events, venues enable artists to map toilet routes, identify barriers, and reflect on distance and urgency. Rather than treating accessibility as a fixed architectural feature, the project explores how access is experienced through time, uncertainty, predictability, and the body’s need for reliable toilet access.
Image description: The ‘Tower Room Map’ shows a reconstruction of the route between the accommodation and the nearest toilet during an active flare-up.
The Tower Room Map reconstructs an experience from a residency during an active flare-up. After requesting accommodation with a private toilet, I was offered the institution’s “Tower Room.” While the request was technically granted, the nearest toilet was located in the basement. During a period of high stool frequency, what appeared accessible on paper became an everyday exercise in urgency, navigation, and endurance. The map traces this journey and reflects on the challenges of communicating access needs before Access Riders became a common practice within the arts.
Image description: The image shows a mapping of thirty daily toilet visits onto Malmö Art Museum’s floor plan. The route is repeatedly traced by hand, visualising the distance travelled while imagining daily artistic work within the building.
Image description: A redesign of Malmö Art Museum. Prototype installation including cramp pillows, last minute buckets and pain medication dispensers, toilet paper supplies, and other speculative access infrastructures.
-Personal contribution by Hendrik Quast made in collaboration with Christina Maeckelburg
Payment to Artists and Art Workers
The working conditions in the arts are increasingly shaped by a structural imbalance between ambitions, resources, and recognition of professional labour. For many artists, project-based work is not an exception but a fundamental condition, requiring constant applications, networking, and temporary collaborations. This instability is often intensified for disabled artists and art workers, who may face additional barriers related to access, capacity, and unequal expectations around productivity. Fair payment is not only a matter of income; it is a recognition of expertise, creative contribution, and professional value. Yet many disabled artists face a difficult tension between being paid for their artistic labour and maintaining essential disability-related benefits. In some systems, receiving payment or demonstrating the ability to work can trigger reassessments of disability status, creating uncertainty and discouraging participation in professional opportunities. Art institutions have a responsibility to address these structural barriers by ensuring transparent fee structures, fair minimum rates, accessible contracts, and long-term support for disabled artists.
Sustainable change requires recognising disability access costs as part of professional practice and creating conditions where disabled artists can contribute without risking financial security or social support.
How to Establish Better Conditions:
-Establish transparent fees, minimum rates, and clear contracts.
-Develop longer employment models for artists and art workers beyond the project-based.
-Create more inclusive organisational structures that enable diverse professional perspectives to shape curatorial and strategic decisions.
Five Concrete Actions for Art Institutions
1) Fair pay for artistic labour and consultancy, and transparency on how funds are distributed.
2) Provide transparency on working conditions, preferably in written form that can be used as a reference.
3) Plan, prioritise, and budget for accessibility from the beginning of a working process. Approach it as an ethic of being together, applied to non-disabled people too, as a way of sustaining the practice.
4) Approach disability as a knowledge-producing framework, and value it at the same level as other frameworks within the arts, policymaking, academia, etc.
5) Be curious. Ask questions. Build genuine, lasting relationships.
Cutdowns
Image description: The image shows a photograph of the work ‘Cutdowns’ (2025), an abstract geometric composition on a tall rectangular canvas. A large, irregular central shape dominates the work, surrounded by smaller rounded forms, rectangles, arcs, circles, and organic shapes. Thin hand-drawn lines weave between the forms, creating loops, curves, and sharp zigzag patterns. The composition combines geometric and organic elements, with strong contrasts between solid shapes and open negative space, giving it an abstract, modern, collage-like appearance.
-Personal contribution by Yuvia Maini