Reframing exhibition accessibility: multisensory curatorship and non-visual experience of visual impairment

This article examines three exhibitions curated by the lead author in New Zealand, developed through cross-sensory collaborations with four artists with visual impairment in China. Featuring non-visual photography, improvised music and dance, and installation art, the exhibitions served as experimental spaces to interrogate how access is constructed and embodied. Using site observation, sensory ethnography, and audience feedback, the study analyses how spatial design, information systems, and perceptual logics shape experience. While audio description and large-print materials supported engagement, Braille labels and tactile installations were often ineffective due to infrastructural and sensory misalignments. The article reframes accessibility as a cultural and epistemological practice, calling for the dismantling of ocularcentric assumptions and the centering of non-visual ways of knowing. Drawing on Critical Disability Studies, the research positions persons with visual impairment as co-creators of curatorial meaning and proposes a shift from symbolic inclusion to structural transformation in exhibition-making.