Nathalie Boobis: Early musings...

In March 2026, Nathalie Boobis began a 12-month hybrid curatorial residency with Arts Catalyst. This placement is part of the Future Curators Programme, a dedicated initiative for Disabled curators within mainstream visual arts institutions, founded by DASH in 2023.

Nathalie’s practice explores how work, social, and political structures fail us at a bodily level. Since 2025, she has led dis_place, Disability Arts Online’s accessible digital gallery, where she foregrounds intersectional disabled perspectives. You can explore a snippet of her recent exhibition, ‘I need to be more than a lesson you learned’, via the online dis_place gallery hosted by Disability Arts Online.

As she settles into her residency at Arts Catalyst, Nathalie shares the core questions driving her research:

“I’m following a thread of thought around the intersections of disability justice, the politics of liberation and crip time. I’ve been thinking about time and crip time for so many years but ironically have never had the time, outside of being a student, to really dig into it. So I’m very grateful to have this opportunity to really get into it and let the research lead the project.”

Early musings on the transformative potentials of wobbly and unreasonable crip time shapes

In this blog Nathalie shares some of her initial thoughts and ideas for the residency developed from these questions and her early research:​​​​​​​

Clock time has always felt to me like a heavy and obscuring mesh laid over messy reality. It is a structure of power, ushered in with the industrial revolution barely 150 years ago. The artist, Perel, writes: “The very forms of knowledge held by bodies in crip time are negated by the daily workings of dominant power structures.” What are those forms of knowledge? For those of us who have once, or still, attempt(ed) to keep up with those daily workings, only to either im or ex plode at some midlife point, how can we key into these knowledges; in our own bodies and others’? Perel says we – all of us – are impossibly incomplete when not every mind and body are included and consulted in the practices of living, creating, building, and imagining. They flip the idea that those living on crip time miss out; no – it is those on normative time that miss out on all that is held in wobbly and unreasonable crip time shapes.

Find the full blog on the Arts Catalyst website

Read more about the Future Curators Programme