2026 Unsilenced Stories

curator

Unsilenced Stories 2026: Art as Witness in Health Research

Unsilenced Stories: Art as Witness in Health Research was the inaugural exhibition of the Unsilenced Stories initiative and the launch of Canada's first open-access digital archive dedicated to artist-led health narratives. Presented by the Canadian Association for Health Humanities (CAHH) in partnership with SAW, the national juried exhibition opened in April 2026 as part of Creating Space 16: The Impact of Identities on Health and Wellbeing, Canada's annual health humanities conference, in Ottawa, Ontario.

Curated by Candace Couse, the exhibition brought together six artists from across Canada whose work critically examined health, illness, disability, care, identity, and healing through contemporary art. Working across painting, photography, sculpture, installation, and interdisciplinary practice, the artists challenged conventional understandings of health by foregrounding lived experience as a vital form of knowledge. The exhibition emerged from a recognition that artists have long contributed important perspectives to conversations surrounding health, yet their voices often remain peripheral within health humanities discourse. Unsilenced Stories was developed to create a dedicated platform where artists are recognized as researchers and knowledge producers whose practices generate new ways of understanding health, illness, care, and wellbeing.

The exhibition was organized around five interconnected thematic areas:

Indigenous Sovereignty in Health: Works that challenged colonial narratives in medicine while foregrounding Indigenous experiences of healthcare, self-determination, and sovereignty over stories of body, mind, spirit, and community.
Reclaiming the Patient Narrative: Works that moved beyond the clinical case study, allowing patients, survivors, caregivers, and communities to reclaim agency over their own health stories and lived experiences.
Embodied States: Explorations of chronic illness, disability, madness, neurodivergence, pain, and other forms of embodiment that resist simplification within biomedical frameworks.
Thresholds of Care & Identity: Works addressing moments of profound transition, including birth, reproductive care, gender-affirming care, ageing, death, dying, and the ways healthcare intersects with identity throughout the life course.
Systems and Structures: Critical examinations of healthcare institutions, bureaucracy, policy, representation, and the social, political, and structural conditions that shape health and wellbeing.

The inaugural call for artists received a tremendous response from across Canada, revealing the extraordinary breadth of artistic practices engaging with health humanities and underscoring the need for dedicated platforms that support this work. While only six artists could be included in the exhibition, the overwhelming response established the foundation for Unsilenced Stories as an ongoing national initiative.

Participating Artists: lwrds duniam, Catherine Hawthorn, Don Kwan, bailey macabre, Hamed Morovati, Asma Sultana

Curatorial Team: Candace Couse (Curator), Danielle Forget (Assistant Curator)

Digital Archive, Knowledge Mobilization & Research Coordination: Keira Chu, Sam Price, Natasha Zilcosky

Jury: Shelley Canning, Shannon Kitchings, Sarah Nelson, Laura Schneider, Cody Tolmie

This project was supported by:

SSHRC Explore Grant (2025–2026), Research Office, University of the Fraser Valley
SSHRC Exchange Grant (2026), Mount Saint Vincent University

Photo Credit: Sam Monastero

Curator’s Statement

Unsilenced Stories is an exhibition and archive project that brings together works by emerging and established artists from across Canada who engage critically with themes of health, illness, and healing. Through a wide range of media and approaches, the selected works foreground patient, clinician, and community-driven narratives as forms of knowledge production. Artists explore embodied experience, interrogate healthcare systems, and assert agency over personal and collective stories. The project positions art as a mode of research-creation, where witnessing makes visible the complexities of lived experience.

Work operating within this framework often navigates the tension between disclosure as an act of self-directed catharsis (and its potential consumption as facilitated voyeurism), alongside the urgent task of making visible the structural conditions that shape lived experience and mobilize collective action. The capacity for these narratives to be instrumentalized, rather than engaged as interventions into systemic injustice, will depend on whether they are positioned as sites of extraction or as spaces of accountability and critical engagement. Ultimately, this trajectory is shaped by the power structures that govern their circulation, reception, and interpretation, as well as the extent to which viewers engage in a broader reckoning with the social and structural conditions that underpin individual experience.

In this vein, viewers are invited to locate themselves within the structures under critique. Consider if discomfort needs to be resolved or avoided, or if it is a potentially productive state. How might our relationship with our own positionalities, and with those of others, open new ways of thinking and relating to the world?

Candace Couse