Discomforting the able-bodied: A conversation with disabled artist Panteha Abareshi about their new exhibition CAREOTICS

CARE AT COST (2025), by Panteha Abareshi. Electronic parts, cotton fibers, glass, stainless steel, cotton fibers, ink, polyester, cardboard, wiring. Photo by Josh Schaedel, courtesy of Panteha Abareshi. 

BY EMMA CIESLIK December 31, 2025

On November 16th, artist Panteha Abareshi closed their latest exhibition CAREOTICS: on giving and taking, curated by Jeanne Vaccaro. Presented by Human resources Los Angeles and curated by Jennifer Doyle, Caroline Ellen Liou, and Jeanne Vaccaro, their solo show examined how the disabled body is related to the fringes of visibility and yet made into a spectacle, bringing a complex duality to the nature of disability as performance. 

Abareshi’s artistic practice is rooted in their lived experiences as a chronically ill/disabled individual with multiple medical illnesses, including sickle cell zero beta thalassemia. Through their art, they investigate the politics of surveillance, sexualization, and infantilization of the disabled body and person, confronting the able-bodied gaze. After their exhibition closed in mid-November, I sat down with Abareshi to investigate the power and anti-abelist politics at the heart of their work. 

Emma Cieslik: Would you mind introducing yourself however you feel comfortable?

Panteha Abareshi: My name is Panteha Abarshi. I use they/them pronouns. I’m an interdisciplinary conceptual artist working in video, sculpture, performance, and my work is rooted around disability and illness, examining what the mechanisms of othering are and the apparatus of power, disempowerment, objectification, and fetishisation that are operating around the sick and the disabled body. 

HONORABLE MENTION (2025), by Panteha Abareshi. Satin, paper, natural fibers, brass, ink. Photo by Josh Schaedel, courtesy of Panteha Abareshi. 

Cieslik: How did you come to create CAREOTICS: on giving and taking? How did you hope/anticipate people reacting to the exhibition? 

Abareshi: My process actually is that I don’t often think about the reception of the work or the audience’s perception of the work until I’m in the actual phase of presenting the artwork. I take into consideration the audience perspective when I’m thinking about participating, when I’m thinking about more immersive styles of installation like with this exhibition how there was sort of an interactive and immersive element to the show. 

I think that discomfort is really important. I think that there is no disruption without discomfort, and so I expected that the work would be very provocative in and of itself and that it would lead the audience to be uncomfortable and to have to sit with the notions of sexploitation and exploitation and violence and the hierarchy of power which stratifies the able body and then the disabled body, the sick body, and to sit with all of these things. So that was what I was really hoping for when thinking about the reception of the work and the relationship between the viewer and the disabled subject as it is manifested within my practice. 

Detail of PRESCRIBED REGIMEN (2025), by Panteha Abareshi. Ink on pharmaceutical promotional notepad papers, sound score. Photo by Josh Schaedel, courtesy of Panteha Abareshi. 

Cieslik: Within that, what is the power and potential of art challenging ableist systems inside the museum and beyond, especially when museums often fail to provide access services not just for exhibitions not created by and for disabled publics but for artists and their own institutional workers? What is the power of facilitating spaces of discomfort for the able-bodied? 

Abareshi: It’s really important to unearth or to upend the comfort that the able-bodied individual is sitting in typically because our world, the western world, writ large is built for the able-bodied individual, and it is inherently hostile to the sick body, the disabled body, to the physically “other” body, and so the significance of the institution as a microcosmic place for criticality to blossom, to bloom, is because it serves as a microcosmic environment representing larger power dynamics, and when you step into the art space, it becomes a concentrated refractory for all of these dynamics and the relationship between those bodies that are in higher positions of power or higher positions of privilege and those that are in more marginalized positions. 

The art space as a refractory is so vital because the able-bodied individual enters that space sort of expecting to have a specific type of experience with artwork that is fully elucidating. If it’s around the topic of “other” bodies is inspirational and comfortable and fits a sort of ableist tonality around existence. Upending and denying the able-bodied viewer a comfortability and denying them an access to the optics and gaze that they would comfortably enact, a very prejudicial, a very judgemental gaze, is a really radical act of defiance and to conjure a subjectivity that is cast in shadow, that is denigrated and to put in a position where the typical strata of power is complicated. All of that is so magnified within the art space, and it becomes a really vital ground for discomfort to grow and to make into material. 

It’s not just about making someone uncomfortable in my work, it’s about taking that feeling of discomfort and making a potent materiality of it as a catalyst for new languages of empathy, new languages around illness and “otherness,” new modes of looking, seeing, knowing and understanding. 

Cieslik: One thing about your work that I love is the performance element. One of my favorite museum events of all time was called Cripping the Galleries. Organized in partnership with Bodies of Work, a Chicago-based consortium of disability arts organizations, the performances--one of which was held at the Art Institute of Chicago--challenged perceptions of how disabled bodies should move and respond to art and be regulated in museums. One of the beautiful byproducts was questioning the ways in which ableist frameworks of showing up within our own disabled bodies are part of performative museum politics. 

What is the importance and impact of not only disabled artists acting and shaping the museum space but also being compensated and their work collected by these institutions? 

Abareshi: I will say first of all, it’s been both an immense pleasure and an immense challenge working with museums because it is a bureaucratic institution, and accommodation and accessibility are always in the bureaucratic realm an afterthought or something that’s put into place after everything else has been accounted for and so I think that the exhibiting, the collecting, and the compensation of artists and their artwork is so powerful because unfortunately, the canon is still a behemoth in the ways in which we find validation and bring a legitimacy to narratives, voices, and perspectives, so finding your way through the museum system and having your work be incurred into the canon is still the language that we speak within art. 

So it should not be down to the museum, to the institution, to legitimize the existence of the disabled subject through the validation of their art practice, but there is a reality to that situation. But it is really important that the disabled body is brought into the museum space, is brought into the institutional space and afforded autonomy in their narrative and in their optics and in their imaging so that change might happen from within. 

PATIENCE (2025), by Panteha Abareshi. Polyurethane, polycarbonate, stainless steel, rubber, silicone. Photo by Josh Schaedel, courtesy of Panteha Abareshi. 

Cieslik: It hits on the importance of the show and work you do, discussing how there’s the reality of many disabled artists that are trying to live and function within this space but at the same time the realities of sometimes what participation in that space, in these systems, can mean, often falling into--as your latest exhibition talks about--this objectification and hypersexualization of the disabled body. 

On that note, in your latest exhibition, you explore how an absence of autonomy makes room for fetishisation, as the disabled person is molded into a tool for the able-bodied viewer to use as a linguistic metaphor and/or sexualized fetish objects. It builds on your 2024 exhibition Impaired Erotics, where you explores the complex dynamics of caregiving, including implications of domination and submission, through medical objects. Can you explain how your exhibition grapples with the fetishisation of disabled bodies, and challenges frameworks of exploitation?

Abareshi: The entire foundation of this show is thinking about the erotics that emerge within the handling of the disabled body, both in the hospital medicalized space and also within the domestic medicalized space of caregiving. It is crucial to me to use the fetishization and the sexploitation of the disabled body as a way of examining the most quotidian of interactions, perceptions, and prejudices against the disabled body. 

Many times people encounter the thematics that I am working and it seems maybe niche to be talking about like the machine of fetishism around the disabled body because one would imagine that disability fetishism is a sort of uncommon modality and think quite literally about it--fetishists, pornographers who are aroused by the notion of disability and illness, but what my work and this show was really focusing on is articulating how the fetishization of the disabled body is written into the fundamental languages we speak around “otherness” and how fetishization shapes languages of prejudice. The two are inextricably linked. 

The show brings in this idea of the domestic, the comfortable, what would be perceived as safe, what would be perceived as a place where you would not expect an exploitation to be unfolding and using that tone and materiality and imaging to formulate a language around how the disabled body is fundamentally fetishized just in being known and being seen, how there is an innately fetishistic nature to the able-bodied gaze and how the able-bodied gaze is incessantly dressing down the disabled body simultaneously castrating it, infantilising it, but also drawing a fetishistic and sexual currency from its vulnerability, from its inability to consent, from its absence of autonomy. 

All of those things are present within the exhibition in the way that the body is fragmented, in the way that the body is bound, in the way that the body is presented, as a consumable fetish object, and then also thinking about fetishism in the notion of object preciousness. To the like aesthetics of the show, it was really important to me to go back to the base meaning of fetish--something precious that you rub between your fingers for luck, something that you stick into your pocket, something that you collect--and thinking about how we treat the disabled body as an object in all of these regards. 

There is also this duality between the way that a shamefulness and a wrongfulness is assigned to being sick, requiring care, being disabled, requiring help, but then simultaneously, there is this almost like inspiration porn tonality to way that the able-bodied individual interfaces with the disabled body just in the most quotidian of circumstances and so that was really my perspective in the show. 

THE WARD (2025), by Panteha Abareshi. Rubber, cotton fibers, stainless steel, polycarbonates, polyurethanes, fiberglass, glass, medical ephemera. Photo by Josh Schaedel, courtesy of Panteha Abareshi. 

Cieslik: It ties into what brings me to this question. As a disabled audio describer, I often encounter people who ask me to censor certain parts of a live performance--whether it’s mistakes made on stage or overt sexual innuendo. As a disabled person, I push back on this hard because this infantilization of disabled people is part of ableist systems that undergird mass institutionalization, mass forced sterilization. How do you push back on censorship and the infantilization of the disabled body while investigating its fetishization in your art?

Abareshi: It’s a difficult thing, censorship. I think that for me, my scholarly writing practice has served really well in combatting censorship, and it’s an unfortunate truth that laying a scholarly foundation to this kind of work brings legitimacy to it in the eyes of the institution. I find that is a barrier to access and a barrier to articulation and creativity for some because there shouldn’t have to be a scholarly foundation or context in that sort of academic language and framework and format for there to be a validity afforded to work but that has been the case, and I have found that because I am constantly writing and speaking about the work and framing it in a crip-theoretical way that has really helped me combat censorship. 

But also [what has helped is] just standing my absolute ground, saying that “why are we looking away?” “Why are we silencing?” Really asking those questions, and those are uncomfortable questions because the instinct is censor. The instinct is to look away. That is how we have been conditioned to think and to know and to understand that which is immensely uncomfortable to come face to face with and to reckon with. 

Also, when thinking about the transcription and the translation of sensory input around artwork or the conceptual input around artwork, thinking about what happens when a video is described and what happens when a sound is written out or is manifested visually and what are the ways in which the transcription and translation of works across senses is a way in which the institution sort of makes inroads of censorship and really combatting by thinking about what radical translation is, what transcription is and what it means to let the body be. I think our instinct as an ableist society at large is to not let the disabled body be, and so for me, it’s about proclaiming a staunch, unmoving nature to these works. It’s taken me a long time to get to that place in my practice where I am able to do that. I have the leverage to do that. I have the respect of the institution in order to do that, and it’s something that I seriously advocate for always in whatever relationships I have with institutions. 

EXAMINATION [EXAM ROOM & OBSERVATION ROOM] (2025), by Panteha Abareshi. Installation. Photo by Josh Schaedel, courtesy of Panteha Abareshi. 

Cieslik: Absolutely, it’s the same way in which I love doing audio description but I always highlight that there is a serious problem in the field for skewing towards White, cis people translating sensory experience, and I’m grateful I get to do this work as a queer person because it challenges our perceptions and the way we describe and assume gender, but I think you’re completely right. It’s a wider conversation that we need to have as a field that’s related to systemic exclusions of people of color from these access service training programs. 

Abareshi: It’s also very important for me to write my own alt text and to be very involved in the access around my work, so being really intentional around even subtitling, even down into keeping my filler words. Like when my talks are subtitled, I’m like, keep in the “likes” and “uhs” and “ums” because to sanitize the work is to take life out of it. It’s down to every artist and that’s how it should be but for me, I like to find the ways to breathe new life and dynamism into every version of the work as it is iterated across lines of access. Even down to how a materials list is written, all of these things are so important in how those that are reading about the work or interacting with the work first through a description as opposed to a visual interfacing, all of that is really under serious consideration in my practice. 

Cieslik: I also like to ask, can you highlight one of your favorite works from CAREOTICS and what it means to you to have this space and to hold that space of discomfort and challenge for yourself and for visitors? 

Abareshi: I’ll tell you two. I think that one piece in the show that is so important to it is the wall piece/video piece that’s the ballad of caregiving. It’s entitled PRESCRIBED REGIMEN. It’s this poetic piece, and it is focused on this rhythmic telling in the second person. It’s like putting the viewer in the position of caregiver and speaking into the second person as it sort of goes through the motions of this rituals of care, and it manifests itself in a visual form as the poem is printed word-by-word on these pharmaceutical swag post-it notes with different medication names, and then also in a video piece where I’ve scanned all of the post-it notes and it’s laid out rhythmically similar to my work Not a Body. 

It [PRESCRIBED REGIMEN] serves as a really strong emotional foundation for the show and brings an intensity but also a great tenderness, like it is both quite intense but quite soft at the same time, and to me, that’s immensely important because everything in the show is about duality or triality, this idea of a knife that cuts hard but a pain that is a pleasure, all of these things--violence and tenderness, the manner in which there’s always sort of a sting within caregiving. 

That piece is really dear to me and then also the piece entitled CARE AT COST, which is the bouquet of surveillance cameras. That was just a really monumental piece that I conceptualized and brought. This show is filled with pieces that were really challenging to perceive how the actual fabrication of them would go and bring forth exactly what I had envisioned, and that was the most satisfying piece to bring forth conceptually and physically. 

Those two are very dear and then the lynchpin of the show, which is the observation room and the porn screening exam room with all of the compilations of porn and then the video piece of my body. I think those works really suture the show together. 

NEW ARTIFACTS [ii] (2025), by Panteha Abareshi. Polycarbonate, stainless steel, resin. Photo by Josh Schaedel, courtesy of Panteha Abareshi. 

Cieslik: One of my last questions focuses on intersectionality. As you share on your website, “the radical abjectification of the normative corporeal forms allows for a rigorous examination of the complexities and hierarchies within loss of ability, and its connection to a larger context of universal fragile fear, pain, and mortality.” How do you call out and “other,” as you’ve mentioned before, the able-bodied body as an act of anti-abelist resistance? And how can this act also be part of the intersectional section, “othering” the normative straight, cis, White body in this space?

Abareshi: I think I call then out by directly pointing out the position of power they are in, putting them directly in a position where their role in the exploitation and objectification and marginalization of the subjects which they are bearing witness to in the context of my work is sort of inescapable, and it’s really intense for people. I have people that are very vocal about how uncomfortable the work made them, people that just turn around and walk away from the work, but also making it really difficult to evade the reality of the power differential itself and then their place in the power differential. I think that is so important in dismantling privilege and blind privilege where bodies or subjects are blind to the immensity of their own privilege where they do not have to confront the immense differential in their privilege, in their power. 

This empowers queer bodies. This empowers Black bodies, Indigenous bodies, trans bodies, disabled bodies, and power is something that dictates interactions and interfacing that may seem so innocuous and so miniscule but to make the disabled subject the center of the work and to put forward the struggle of the disabled body is contorting itself into a shape that is legible and comfortable for the able-bodied person, that is a difficult thing to confront as an able-bodied individual, that what you are not even taking an ounce of energy or consideration towards is extremely laborious and painful on the end of the other individual as they scramble to make themselves legible in order to fit, in order to make themselves squareshaped to fit into the square hole so that they may be afforded even a modicum of validation in their otherness. 

It’s a really uncomfortable thing to reckon with that you, even in a passive way, have been contributing to the disenfranchisement of “othered” bodies, but it has to remain at the forefront and so that’s really how I think about it in my work. 

IN A VIOLENT PRONE (2025), by Panteha Abareshi. Polyurethane, silicone, polycarbonate, butterfly needles, medical tubing, medical materials. Photo by Josh Schaedel, courtesy of Panteha Abareshi. 

Cieslik: I think also challenging the ways that White saviorism and able-bodied saviorism manifests in the disability community and calling out frameworks that seek to gratify a White privilege and White superiority in performing inclusion. 

Abareshi: A new piece that I am working on is thinking about this idea of the noble White savior and the inspiration porn kind of language and imaging. 

Cieslik: That’s exciting! I can’t wait to see it. My last question--how can people support your work. I cannot recommend your Substack enough, especially your September piece On the Children’s Hospital and August one On Cripple Recollection. 

Abareshi: At the moment, my Substack, my Instagram. Financially, I sell t-shirts and postcards with my original postcards on them and that really helps to support my practice, but the Substack, it’s free and I really love just having that available for people. That’s a great way to support my practice and keep up with everything I’m sharing. I’m planning on doing a crit class where people can sign up to participate in this two-week course where we are meeting every other day, so that was a great opportunity for people to support my practice if they want to join that.