Ryan Gander
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Ryan Gander (b 1976) is a British artist who creates conceptual art exploring language, knowledge, and how we perceive things. He uses sculpture, film, writing, photography, installation, and performance to encourage viewers to make their own connections and invent their own narratives.
Gander is a wheelchair user who was born with a severe brittle bone condition. He was hospitalized for long periods of time as a child. Despite various interviews and works made in which Gander explicitly states he does not understand himself to be disabled or “differently abled” to anyone else, his work is interpreted, often by able-bodied commentators, as that of a disabled artist.
In his work The End (2020) an animatronic mouse poking its head through a gallery wall it has burrowed through elaborates further on the capturing of difference, voicing the opinion of the artist: “Difference has become a currency of sorts. I happen to have been born with a great difference to most, and one that is visually recognisable at that. A curse to some, but a blessing to others. To me, it is neither. I am not sure how or when, but at some point, I just chose not to identify with my difference. I chose to ignore it, not in the hope that it would go away, but in the hope that being different would not consume my time and energy that could be better spent doing all the good stuff in the world.”
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