In collaboration with Tangled Art + Disability, the Frictions of Futurity in Transplant Medicine project invites disabled, crip, d/Deaf, Mad, Sick, and chronically ill artists to submit proposals for new commissioned works on the theme of futurity, curative imaginaries, and solid organ transplantation.
We are especially interested in proposals from transplant recipients or their support persons. Two artists will be selected for a 6 month artist-in-residence with the Frictions project, and invited to create, construct, deconstruct, and challenge knowledge related to transplantation through their artistic practice.

The Frictions of Futurity Project connects artists, researchers, academics, health care providers, transplant recipients, and their support persons, bringing our varied perspectives together.

We aim to understand what possibilities arise when the challenges of heart, liver, and kidney solid organ transplant are reconsidered through a feminist/crip technoscience frame.
Some of the questions we ask include: How might lives become more liveable pre- and post-transplant? What are novel ways that technologies in transplantation are cripped by users? How do we understand networks of care, obligation, and issues of justice in light of organ failure, long waitlists and supply-demand issues? What is “risky” and how is risk conceptualized in relation to disability?

Themes may include, but are not limited to:

– Ethics of organ transplantation
– Crip futurity, chronicity, and disability culture
– Systems of care and interdependence
– Lived experience of transplant
– Challenges of organ procurement and waitlisting
– Experience of organ failure and/or transplant failure
– Experiences of risk, liminality, friction, thriving, livability, ambivalence
– End of life care, MAiD

Artists’ work should address these themes in relation to organ transplantation, but a wide range of interpretations are welcome, i.e. the approaches toward transplantation may be abstract, non-literal, and unexpected. Playing with the notion of “friction” is welcomed.

Artists will exhibit their work at a public salon event and through Tangled Art + Disability gallery and website. Artists will also have the opportunity to participate in a multi-day stakeholders symposium at the conclusion of the project in Summer 2023. There are also opportunities for interested artists to take part in a series of multidisciplinary salons through the project’s duration.

First Residency Details:

Duration: November 1, 2021 – April 30, 2022
Stipend: $12,000 + $2,000 material costs

The application deadline for the first residency is October 4, 2021

Second Residency Details:

Duration: May 1, 2022 – October 31, 2022
Stipend: $12,000 + $2,000 material costs

The application deadline for the second residency is April 4, 2022