Call for Submissions: Unsilenced Stories 2027 – Off the Charts

Asma Sultana, We Forget Our Pleasures; We Remember Our Sufferings, 2024, installation. Photograph by Sam Monastero. Presented in Unsilenced Stories, 2026.

A National Juried Exhibition Exploring Stories Beyond the Healthcare Record

Presented by the Canadian Association for Health Humanities, Rotary Centre for the Arts, and the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art.

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2027, at 11:59pm PT
Artist Notifications: Late March 2027
Exhibition Period: June 1 – October 6, 2027, including installation and deinstallation
Exhibition Location: Rotary Centre for the Arts and Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna, BC

Exhibition Theme

The Canadian Association for Health Humanities (CAHH) invites submissions for Unsilenced Stories: Off the Charts, a national juried exhibition exploring 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.

Presented as part of Creating Space 17: Off the Charts, this exhibition asks what remains undocumented in healthcare and what is lost when complex human experiences are reduced to records, diagnoses, data points, and institutional narratives. Unsilenced Stories invites artists to consider the stories that live beyond the chart. Through contemporary creative practice, artists can challenge dominant narratives, reveal hidden histories, document alternative ways of knowing, and reimagine what counts as knowledge within health and healthcare.

Thematic Categories

CAHH welcomes submissions that engage the following themes:

1. Parallel Records: Works that explore stories existing alongside official records, including personal narratives, caregiving experiences, family histories, patient journals, shadow archives, and forms of knowledge that remain undocumented within institutional systems.
2. Bodies Beyond Measurement: Works that examine aspects of embodiment that resist quantification, including experiences of chronic illness, disability, madness, neurodivergence, pain, fatigue, sensory experience, and other forms of embodied knowledge.
3. Memory, Ghosts, and Inheritance: Works that address grief, loss, memory, intergenerational trauma, ancestral presence, inherited conditions, family archives, dementia, absence, and the ways histories leave traces on bodies and communities.
4. Indigenous Knowledges, Sovereignty, and Relational Care: Works that centre Indigenous understandings of wellness, kinship, land, memory, healing, community care, and relational responsibility. CAHH welcomes submissions that challenge colonial systems of healthcare and documentation while affirming Indigenous sovereignty over stories, knowledge, cultural practices, and ways of knowing.
5. Counter-Mapping Care: Works that explore alternative networks, ecologies, and practices of care, including mutual aid, chosen family, community health initiatives, informal caregiving, activism, collective responsibility, and non-institutional approaches to wellness.
6. Rewriting the Record: Works that intervene directly in systems of documentation, diagnosis, archives, bureaucracy, and institutional authority. Artists may examine questions of voice, representation, consent, erasure, surveillance, and power within healthcare systems.

Media

All media will be considered, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, video, sound, performance documentation, textile and fibre-based work, digital and interactive media, and interdisciplinary and experimental practices.

Eligibility

Open to emerging, mid-career, and established artists with connections to Kanata/Canada. Artists from Indigenous, Black, racialized, disabled, mad, neurodivergent, and 2SLGBTQIA+ communities are strongly encouraged to apply.

Artist Support

Artist fees, inclusive of taxes, will be paid to all selected artists as well as additional supports, in accordance with available funding and exhibition resources. CAHH is committed to supporting artists as vital contributors to health humanities research, knowledge creation, and public dialogue.

Archive

Selected artists will be invited to participate in the Unsilenced Stories Digital Archive. The archive serves as a publicly accessible resource for educators, researchers, artists, students, healthcare practitioners, and community members interested in the intersections of art, health, illness, care, disability, and embodiment.

Artists retain full copyright of their work. Participation in the archive is granted through a non-exclusive license for educational and research purposes, and work can be removed at any time by request of the artist.

Selection Process

Submissions will be reviewed by a multidisciplinary jury consisting of artists, health humanities scholars, clinicians, and community members.

Selection criteria include:

• Artistic excellence
• Conceptual strength
• Relevance to the exhibition theme
• Contribution to critical dialogue within health humanities
• Feasibility of exhibition

Submission Requirements

Artists may submit up to three works or series, with up to three images for each proposed work or series.

• Artist bio (150 words maximum): a concise account of the artist, key themes or style, notable achievements, and where the artist lives and works.
• Artist statement (250 words maximum): an account of the artist’s core concepts and process that explicitly links the submitted work to one or more exhibition themes.
• CV: one PDF file, maximum three pages recommended, including contact information, education or training, exhibition history, awards, grants or residencies, publications or features, and related professional experience, if applicable.
• Information used to document and catalogue each work, including title, date, medium or materials, dimensions or duration, and other requested artwork details.
• Images: JPEG files, 1800px on the shortest side and under 5 MB each. Name files LastName_Title_1.jpg.

How to Submit

Review the complete call and submit through the online form on the Unsilenced Stories 2027 artist-call page.

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2027, at 11:59pm PT

For additional information or questions, contact:
Candace Couse, Curator | candace.couse@ufv.ca

Rotary Centre for the Arts
421 Cawston Avenue
Kelowna, BC V1Y 6Z1

Instagram
CAHH @CAHH_ACSHS
Rotary Centre for the Arts @rotarycentreforthearts
Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art @the_alternator
Asma Sultana @meetasultana

Accessibility
The Rotary Centre for the Arts and the Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art are fully physically accessible, including step-free entry and accessible washrooms.

Image Descriptions
1. Two elongated dresses—red and white—hang against a dark wall. A circular spotlight illuminates the white and red garments, while long fabric extends toward the floor.
2. Logos for the Canadian Association for Health Humanities, Rotary Centre for the Arts, and Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art appear side by side on a white background.