2027 Unsilenced Stories

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Button Image: Anne Steves, Tumours and Tubers

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Unsilenced Stories 2027: Off the Charts

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​Project in Development

Following the success of the inaugural exhibition in Ottawa, Unsilenced Stories returns in 2027 with a new national juried exhibition developed in partnership with the Canadian Association for Health Humanities (CAHH) as part of Creating Space 17: Off the Charts, taking place in Kelowna, British Columbia.

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Building upon the foundations established in 2026, this second iteration expands the project's scope while continuing to position artists as researchers and knowledge producers whose creative practices contribute to health humanities scholarship.

Presented through a national open call, the exhibition invites artists from across Canada to explore the stories, knowledges, and experiences that exist beyond, between, and outside the records, systems, and narratives through which healthcare institutions define and document human experience.

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What forms of knowledge exist beyond the medical record? Many aspects of health remain impossible to quantify. Experiences of illness, caregiving, disability, memory, identity, grief, community, spirituality, culture, and resilience often resist institutional forms of documentation. Through contemporary art, Unsilenced Stories creates space for these perspectives to become visible, valued, and shared.

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Curatorial Themes

The exhibition explores six interconnected thematic areas:

1. Parallel Records: Stories that exist alongside official medical records, including caregiving, family histories, personal archives, undocumented experiences, and alternative forms of knowledge.

2. Bodies Beyond Measurement: Embodied experiences that resist clinical categorization, including chronic illness, disability, neurodivergence, pain, fatigue, madness, and sensory ways of knowing.

3. Memory, Ghosts, and Inheritance: Works exploring grief, inherited conditions, dementia, ancestral presence, intergenerational trauma, memory, loss, and the traces left by health across generations.

4. Indigenous Knowledges, Sovereignty, and Relational Care: Works that centre Indigenous understandings of wellness, kinship, land, memory, healing, community care, and relational responsibility while affirming Indigenous sovereignty over stories, knowledge, cultural practices, and ways of knowing.

5. Counter-Mapping Care: Alternative networks, ecologies, and practices of care, including mutual aid, chosen family, community health initiatives, activism, collective responsibility, and non-institutional approaches to wellbeing.

6. Rewriting the Record: Works that intervene in systems of documentation, diagnosis, archives, bureaucracy, surveillance, consent, and institutional authority while questioning who has the power to define health knowledge.

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Expanding the Project

The 2027 exhibition represents an important evolution for Unsilenced Stories. In addition to the exhibition itself, the project continues to expand the Unsilenced Stories Digital Archive while exploring new partnerships, public programming, artist talks, and community engagement opportunities throughout Kelowna.

By extending beyond a single exhibition venue, the project seeks to strengthen relationships between artists, researchers, healthcare practitioners, educators, students, and community organizations, creating new opportunities for interdisciplinary dialogue and public engagement.

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Current Partners

Canadian Association for Health Humanities (CAHH)

Creating Space 17

Rotary Centre for the Arts

Additional community and exhibition partners to be announced.

Call for Artists

The national call for artists will open in Fall 2026.

Artists working in all media are encouraged to apply.

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Timeline​

Fall 2026
National call for artists

Winter 2027
Jury process and artist selection

Spring 2027

June 2027 opening during Creating Space 17: Off the Charts

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This Page Will Grow

As the project develops, this page will be updated with participating artists, venues, programming, installation images, and additional resources documenting the evolution of the exhibition.