Call for Submissions: Unsilenced Stories: Art as Witness in Health Research

Presented by the Canadian Association for Health Humanities (CAHH) in partnership with the artist-run centre SAW,

Location: Club SAW located at 67 Nicholas Street in Ottawa's Arts Court building, Ontario

Exhibition Dates: April 19 – 21, 2026

Opening Reception: April 20th, 2026

Submission Deadline: Feb 28, 2026, 11:59 pm PST

Artist Notifications: March 2026

Territorial Acknowledgement

CAHH and SAW acknowledge that this exhibition will take place on the unceded, unsurrendered Territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation. We pay respect to their enduring stewardship of the land and waters. This acknowledgement is a commitment to foreground Indigenous voices and to challenge the colonial narratives that have historically shaped healthcare.

Exhibition Theme 

The Canadian Association for Health Humanities (CAHH) invites submissions for Unsilenced Stories: Art as Witness in Health Research, a juried exhibition presented in partnership with Club SAW, a leading artist-run centre, as a core component of the Creating Space 2026 national health humanities conference. The theme for Creating Space 16 is “The Impact of Identities on Health and Wellbeing.”

The accompanying exhibition directly embodies the conference’s theme of Indigenous and patient-centered research by centering voices often excluded from medical discourse. Unsilenced Stories aims to create a vital space where visual art fosters dialogue that bridges art, research, and lived experience, making knowledge accessible across disciplines and clinical structures.

We seek emerging and professional artists that explore health, illness, and healing through a critical lens. We welcome submissions from clinician-artists that document their own bodily experiences or represent ethical, consent-based collaborations with patients as co-creators. Selected works will be exhibited at Club SAW and become part of a permanent, publicly accessible digital exhibition archive on the CAHH website, serving as an enduring resource for interdisciplinary project partnerships, education and research.

Thematic Categories

We welcome submissions that engage with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Indigenous Sovereignty in Health: Works that challenge colonial narratives in medicine, share lived experiences of healthcare, and assert autonomy over stories of body, mind, and spirit.

• Reclaiming the Patient Narrative: Art that moves beyond the clinical case study, allowing patients, survivors, and communities to document their journeys and reclaim agency over their health stories.

• Embodied States: Explorations of living with chronic pain, illness, disability, madness, neurodivergence, and other embodied differences.

• Thresholds of Care & Identity: Work that bears witness to gender-affirming care, childbirth, abortion, death, dying, and other profound transitions related to health and identity.

• Systems and Structures: Critiques of the healthcare system itself, its architectures, bureaucracies, and the systemic inequities that impact well-being.

Submission Guidelines

Eligibility: Emerging and professional artists residing in Canada. Artists from Indigenous, Black, racialized, disabled, mad, and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities are strongly encouraged to apply.

Media: All media considered (2D, 3D, video, performance, installation). Artists are responsible for providing any specialized equipment. All work must be ready for exhibition, and the delivery/pickup of the work is the responsibility of the artist. If the artist wishes to have the work insured, this too, is the sole responsibility of the artist.

 Curator

The show is curated by Dr. Candace Couse, whose work builds the physical and digital infrastructures for art to critically address illness narratives.

Jury

A diverse jury comprising artists (including Indigenous artists), clinicians, and health humanities scholars will review submissions. Selection will be based on artistic excellence, relevance to the theme, fit, and potential to advance critical dialogue.

Venue & Partnership

The exhibition will be hosted at Club SAW, a cornerstone of Ottawa's community, known for its commitment to innovative and challenging contemporary art. Our partnership with SAW underscores our shared commitment to supporting professional artists and engaging the public in meaningful discourse.

SAW is fully wheelchair-accessible, including its exhibition spaces, Club SAW and the Nordic Lab. The centre is located over two levels that are serviceable by elevator, and it has two accessible washrooms.

Artist Support

All selected artists will receive an exhibition fee of $515.

Artists are responsible for costs associated with shipping or transporting work to and from Club SAW.

Archive 

Selected artists grant CAHH a non-exclusive license to reproduce images of their work in the publicly accessible digital archive for non-commercial educational and research purposes. Artists retain full copyright of their work.

Contact

For questions, please contact: Candace.Couse@ufv.ca

This project is supported by the 2025-2026 SSHRC Explore Grant, provided by the Research Office of the University of the Fraser Valley and the 2026 SSHRC Exchange Grant, provided by the Research Office of Mount Saint Vincent University.