A world first online visual art exhibition exploring the intersection between gender and disability launches on 22 July coinciding with Disability Pride Month.
This is Gender presents Cripping the Lens: Gender, Disability, and the Politics of Visibility in collaboration with the feminist international human rights organisation, CREA, and Canada’s largest disability arts organisation, National Access Art Centre (NaAC).
Established in 2019, This is Gender runs the world's largest photography and visual arts competition that explores gender justice.
Fifty original artworks judged by disabled artists and visual culture experts were whittled down from more than 800 worldwide submissions.
Now in its fifth year, its global call-outs invite artists to not only showcase their work, but to join a world-wide movement for authentic, inclusive representation.
Spanning continents, cultures, identities and perspectives, Cripping the Lens highlights the overlooked intersection between gender and disability, exploring how social structures shape what we see and who gets seen.
Imogen Bakelmun, curator and founder of This is Gender, explained: “This exhibition spotlights untold stories that explore how gender and disability is lived and experienced across the world, not as separate identities, but as deeply connected experiences. Disability is not gender neutral. Gender is not disability blind. These identities collide, overlap, and reshape one another in ways our culture rarely acknowledges.”
One such story comes from Indian multimedia designer and artist Hardeep Singh, whose digital print Fragmented Faces was awarded in the ‘Bodymind’ category. Described by judges as “unapologetically defiant,” the work weaves together deaf and gender-fluid identity, challenging the boundaries of how both are represented and perceived.
Speaking about the impact of the exhibition, Hardeep said: “This exhibition helps break barriers and provides more exposure to artists like myself who see the world through a deaf lens. Around the world, conversations about disability and gender are often marginalised. I’m proud to be part of this global artistic response, which confronts stigma and exclusion. This exhibition is a refusal to be silenced, simplified, or seen only through someone else’s lens.”
The exhibition raises important questions at a time when equality gains are being rolled back globally - from social protection guarantees in the UK to delayed anti-discrimination laws in Asia, Latin America, and the US.
Imogen said: “Around the world, hard-won rights are being eroded. From hollowed out social protection systems and inaccessible healthcare, to stalled anti-discrimination laws - we’re seeing renewed threats to the freedoms and protections many have fought for.”
This is Gender has a growing archive of hundreds of visual stories drawn from more than 5,000 submissions across 140+ locations.
Imogen added: “Art has the power to disarm, disrupt, and reveal what policy so often fails to see. In a world that misrepresents or erases disabled and gendered lives, it becomes a tool for resistance, and a space to imagine new ways of being. These images speak from the body, from experience, and from the margins.”
She said: “These works remind us that care is power, visibility is survival and joy can be revolutionary. They ask us not just to look differently, but to question the systems that determine who is visible and valuable.”
The exhibition launches on 22 July 2025. It is a permanent online exhibition and can be viewed HERE
See details of This is Gender, current artist call out here, Law and Justice. https://thisisgender.global5050.org/law-justice-competition/
Header Image: 'Cricket is my Emotions' Hatharzi, Chattogram, Bangladesh, 2024. - Ziaul Huque
