McARTHUR, Park; MICHALKA, Matthias (ed.); TITZ, Susanne (ed.)
Contact M

My name is Elaine Lillian Joseph and I’m a Black British writer, audio describer, and translator who creates aesthetic experiences through embodied description. I have a soft, flattened out Birmingham accent with the occasional West Indian inflection by way of Saint Kitts and Jamaica.
This audio guide is an artwork. This audio guide is an exhibition. It is titled Contact M and contains artworks made in the 2010s and 2020s by Park McArthur. Contact M was recorded in German and English.
Some artworks are only exhibited here, in this audio guide. Some artworks were on view from March to September, 2025 at the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany and mumok in Vienna, Austria. Reading or listening to Contact M keeps it open as an exhibition.
Audio description is typically created through close, in-person experiences of a performance, film, artwork, or exhibition. Neither Park nor I visited the museums while making Contact M. I recorded it in London, UK and Park wrote it in New Jersey, USA with contributions from collaborators and translators living in New York City; Atlanta; Long Beach, California; and Berlin. Your visit describes the exhibition for us.

The catalogue for Park McArthur’s exhibition Contact M, co-organized by mumok in Vienna and Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach. 

Since her landmark 2014 exhibition Ramps, that gathered temporary ramps, disabled parking signage, and a Wikipedia entry on disabled writer and activist Marta Russell, the practice of McArthur  has consistently dealt with processes of degeneration and dependency, as experiences filled with aesthetic possibility and formal invention, providing a new critical approach to institution and the notion of public. 

Questions of simultaneous experience and access to art and culture shaped Contact M. The impossibility of experiencing the exhibition in its entirety was one of the project’s propositions – with a text and audio guide conceived as an artwork, and reproduced in this book, along with reference lists, and texts by Park McArthur and Geelia Ronkina.

Published by mumok / Museum Abteiberg, 2025
Exhibition Catalogues