Artist seeks home for award-winning Resistance

A leading disabled film-maker is seeking a permanent home for her award-winning installation about the killing of hundreds of thousands of disabled people in Nazi Germany.

Liz Crow’s Resistance: which way the future? has received critical and popular acclaim and has been shown at venues across the country as well as at the renowned Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

But because Crow has to be so closely involved with touring Resistance, she is looking for an organisation to take over this work.

The Aktion-T4 programme is believed to have led to the targeted killing of as many as 200,000 disabled people, and possibly many more, and became the blueprint for the “Final Solution”, through which the Nazis hoped to wipe out Jews, gay people and other minority groups.

Crow’s film-based installation explores the values that allowed T4 to happen but also shows how some disabled people found the courage to resist.

It also draws close parallels with issues that challenge disabled people’s right to exist today, such as the campaign to legalise assisted suicide, the rise in disability hate crime, and cases of institutional abuse, such as allegations concerning Winterbourne View hospital near Bristol.

She believes Resistance “is needed more now than when I started working on it” and has helped people think “in ways they haven’t done before”.

But she is keen to find a solution that will allow her to concentrate on other projects, possibly by finding a permanent venue or an organisation with the “experience and resources or imagination” to tour the work itself.

Crow said it would be “a terrible waste” if Resistance had to fold. “At the moment, Resistance is so bound up with me that it requires me to keep going out there, and four years on I need to be moving onto other projects.

“I need a solution that, when I pull out, it doesn’t fold. I can’t just let it fold.”

Resistance will be shown at Bristol’s M Shed in January 2012, and in Gloucester Cathedral this autumn.

Any organisation that might be able to help can contact Liz Crow at [email protected]

29 June 2011