Curating Critical Futurities in Transplant Medicine: Arts Practices as New Knowledge

Curating Critical Futurities in Transplant Medicine is a pop-up art installation that showcases visual, sonic, and multimedia artistic works created to explore the complexities, unknowns, and lived experiences of solid organ transplantation. The pieces presented have been developed as part of the Frictions of Futurity and Cure in Transplant Medicine Project, a multi-year, research-creation study that unabashedly sits at the convergence of crip technoscience, feminist science and technology studies, and arts-based research engaged with disability arts and artists. The impetus for the project comes, in part, from an understanding that artistic practices can generate “speculative frames through which to defamiliarize and reorganize the local” (Loveless 2019). By transporting art out of the gallery and into a national transplant conference, we invite a reconsideration of art: as intervention, as a way to generate, reveal, name, alter and engage with the multiplicity of experiences within transplantation. The pop-up installation persuades us to know differently, so as to materialize liveability and thriving in a transplantation lifeworld as political, creative acts.

Frictions of Futurity Project Arts-Mobilization Team

• Dr. Suze Berkhout
• Dr. Kelly Fritsch
• Ms. Eva-Marie Stern
• Chloe Wong-Mersereau
• Alexandra Frankel

Guest Curator

• Ms. Élise Desaulniers