Riana Head-Toussaint
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About

Riana Head-Toussaint is an interdisciplinary disabled/crip artist, who uses a manual wheelchair for mobility. Her work often crosses traditional artform boundaries, and exists in online and offline spaces. She employs choreography, performance, video/film, sound design, immersive/participatory installation and audience activation to create works that interrogate entrenched systems, structures and ways of thinking; and advocate for social change.

The enduring concerns across her works are agency, representation, the limits of empathy, and how these impact people across different marginalised intersections. Her work is deeply informed by her experiences as a disabled person of Afro-Caribbean descent, and her training as a legal practitioner.

Riana’s practice has been supported by a range of organisations and institutions, including the Australia Council for the Arts, Create NSW, Human Rights Watch, the British Council (Aus/UK), Performance Space, the Institute of Modern Art, the Keir Foundation, Carriageworks, Dancehouse, Firstdraft, PARI, Proximity Festival, DADAA, Firstdraft, PACT Centre for Emerging and Experimental Art, Ausdance NSW, Urban Theatre Projects, Legs on the Wall, Dirtyfeet and Bundanon Trust; and have been presented at Dancehouse, Carriageworks, I-Dance Film Festival, 107 Projects, Sydney Fringe, Crack Theatre Festival, WOW Festival, ATYP, Shopfront Arts Co-Op and Platform Live.

Riana lives and works on the unceded lands of the Eora Nation.

Artworks
Advocacy

As well as individualised creative pursuits, Riana’s artistic practice involves broader curatorial/space-making projects aimed at increasing artistic opportunities and fostering connection between traditionally sidelined and marginalised artists. Her curatorial practice is a direct response to the lack of meaningfully accessible opportunities she experienced and witnessed earlier in her career as an artist. She is part of the 2022 Australia Council Biennale Delegates Program, and is currently curating ‘Conductive Site’ performance night at Firstdraft Gallery.

She founded Headquarters in 2021: a disability-led digital space, committed to centering and celebrating the work of disabled creatives and the diversity of life with disability. Headquarters’ website is currently under construction and will launch in May 2022.

Curation
Contact
Animate Loading
live (site-responsive; iterative)
2022

A site-responsive work on a carpark rooftop in Parramatta, *Animate Loading* involves a dynamic group of seven reconfiguring their interactions with the architecture and each other.

As the performers draw on their diverse lived experiences, movement languages and bodies to build their own ecology in the space, their presence and movement functions as a call to action. To disrupt, resist and change our relationship with public spaces, and with each other within them.

A radical disability-led project; based on flexible, anti-extractive and access-centred processes. At the core of this development process is the simultaneous creation of an intangible structure: an adaptive space with a culture where all the collaborating artists are empowered to creatively contribute fully and freely.

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InspoCam
video/installation
2021

An intimate experience awaits. A private show, just for you…

‘I’m going to make you feel so good… Can I do that for you?’

In this uncertain and anxiety-provoking global context, people are increasingly searching for sources of encouragement, pleasure, and validation around the legitimacy of their existences. One well that is often dipped into during these moments of doubt is ‘Inspiration Porn’.
The term – coined by late Australian disability activist Stella Young – refers to forms of media material that portray disabled people as objects of inspiration, for the benefit of non-disabled people.

‘InspoCam’ explores the choreography and consumption of Inspiration Porn. It interrogates our tendency to objectify others in the quest for our own personal gratification, and questions when and under what circumstances this might be ok.

2020 – in-situ and online at PACT Centre for Emerging and Experimental Art
2021-present – online; as part of Utp’s Dream Sequence digital program – curated by Jessica Olivieri
2022 – in-situ at The Bearded Tit; as part of CLOSER – curated by Katie Winten
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First Language
video
2020

Riana’s video work First Language is currently shortlisted for the 2021 Footscray Art Prize.

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Menu Video Demo
delete me
2022

Demo of menu video. Modify/delete as needed.

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Very Excellent Disabled Dancing
live
2020

In Very Excellent Disabled Dancing, three visibly disabled dancers expose the distinct, persistent differences in the way dance is consumed and understood when performed by people with disability. The work involves a synergy of movement and video. The dancers physically demonstrate the effects of the external, objectifying gaze, amplified by capturing and projecting their movement via live video feed. This is then contrasted against movement from a place of knowledge and resistance — magnified by intimate, pre-recorded footage.

The dancers lay bare anatomical preoccupations, saccharine sympathy and uninformed hostility — confronting and defiantly reframing the dominant gaze to make way for genuine engagement with, understanding of, and appreciation for diversity in dance.

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Behind The Scenes
live
2019

This meta-theatre experience, created by Riana Head-Toussaint, invites you to cast the roles using the auditions and interviews she conducts to inform your decision.

The roles up for grabs are that of roommates Lek (originally played by Mason Phoumirath) and Charlie (originated by Holly Craig) who are an aspiring actor of Thai-Lao-British decent and a visually impaired honors student respectively.

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UnTitled
video
2019

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