Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

Bio

Aoife Donnellan is a PhD student in Anthropology at University College London researching accessibility practices in contemporary exhibition making. She is a curator, researcher, and art writer from Ireland, based in Berlin. Her research and curatorial interests are in radical access practices, crip methodologies and sustainable work practices.

Aoife is a British Art Network Bursary Awardee 2025-26 from Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre. In 2024, she curated Ciara Barker’s solo exhibition ‘Libraries of Rest’, as part of Zeitgeist Irland 24, an initiative of Culture Ireland and the Embassy of Ireland, Germany. In 2022, Aoife was a co-curator at the UCL Ethnography Collection where she contributed an archival study of artefacts that had been lost by the collection. Since 2020, Aoife has been publishing art writing in Berlin, interviewing a wide range of practitioners and reviewing a variety of exhibitions. She holds an MA in Material and Visual Cultures from University College London.

Project Description

Access is a Practice: Accessibility Methodologies in the Arts

Positioned at the intersection of anthropology, museum studies, and critical access, and through ethnographic fieldwork with artists, curators, and institutions in Berlin, this project will analyse access as a creative practice-based approach that ruptures normative expectations around communication, participation, and interpretation, while simultaneously producing sustainable working practices. Using multimodal ethnographic techniques, such as studio visits and co-production, and an interdisciplinary approach that places anthropological and curatorial methods at the forefront, the project examines innovative critical access methods employed by artists in the disabled community. Through interviews, participant observation, and access as a method, the research will examine cripistomological ways of knowing and making. The outcome will be a written thesis alongside a curatorial framework for methodological access and an exhibition or display component created with the participants during the fieldwork. By researching with artists who use access as a creative method to address the research questions, it will not only consider the creation of a habitus of ableism in the art world but explore the possibilities and potentials of crip techniques understood in their own right.