Unsilenced Stories 2026: Art as Witness in Health Research

Creating Space 16
Ottawa, Ontario
April 30 – May 2, 2026

Presented as part of Creating Space 16: The Impact of Identities on Health and Wellbeing.

Photo Credit: Sam Monastero

Unsilenced Stories: Art as Witness in Health Research marked the inaugural exhibition of the Unsilenced Stories initiative and the launch of Canada's first peer-reviewed open-access digital archive dedicated to artist-led health narratives. Presented during Creating Space 16, the exhibition established a new national platform recognizing contemporary artistic practice as a vital mode of knowledge production within health humanities.

The national juried exhibition brought together six artists from across Canada working across painting, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and interdisciplinary practice. Together, their works explored health, illness, disability, care, identity, memory, healing, and lived experience through contemporary art.

The exhibition affirmed artistic practice as health humanities research in its own right. The selected works foregrounded embodied knowledge, questioned institutional systems, and created space for perspectives that often remain absent from clinical and academic discourse. Through this approach, Unsilenced Stories demonstrated how artistic practice contributes to new understandings of health while fostering dialogue across the arts, humanities, healthcare, education, and community sectors.

The inaugural national Call for Artists received submissions from across Canada, demonstrating the breadth and diversity of contemporary artistic practices engaging with health humanities. The response affirmed the need for a sustained national platform supporting artists working at the intersection of contemporary art, research creation, and health humanities, laying the foundation for Unsilenced Stories as an ongoing annual initiative.

2026 Exhibition 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.

Participating Artists

  • lwrds duniam

  • Catherine Hawthorn

  • Don Kwan

  • bailey macabre

  • Hamed Morovati

  • Asma Sultana

Exhibition Team

Curator: Candace Couse

Assistant Curator: Danielle Forget

Technical Director: Nick Schofield

Digital Archive, Knowledge Mobilization & Research Coordination

  • Keira Chu

  • Samantha Price

  • Natasha Zilcosky

Jury

  • Shelley Canning

  • Shannon Kitchings

  • Sarah Nelson

  • Laura Schneider

  • Cody Tolmie

Project Partners

  • Canadian Association for Health Humanities

  • SAW Centre

  • University of Ottawa Art Gallery

  • Creating Space 16 Conference

Funding Support

  • SSHRC Explore Grant (2025–2026), Research Office, University of the Fraser Valley

  • SSHRC Exchange Grant (2026), Mount Saint Vincent University