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Short abstract:

We engage with two pop-up art exhibitions as an emergent and experimental space within a Transplant Medicine project, noting how the unexpected, unfamiliar, and out-of-place offer opportunities for new and layered ways of making meaning and knowing that disrupt disciplinary boundaries of STS.

Long abstract:

In this presentation we explore the ways artistic spaces and curatorial sensibilities can enhance experimental methods in sensory ethnography, facilitating transdisciplinary conversations and generating new ways of materializing knowledge. Discussing the practice of creating “pop-up” galleries as part of the Frictions of Futurity and Cure in Transplant Medicine project, we turn to the pop-up gallery as an emergent and experimental space where the presence of the unexpected, unfamiliar, and out-of-place offer opportunities for new and layered ways of making meaning and knowing that disrupt conventional disciplinary boundaries of science and technology.

One pop-up gallery sits in the patient and family lounge on the transplant ward of a hospital; another pop-up gallery fills the gathering hall of a national transplant conference. Textile-based fabric art pieces transform familiar hospital materials—gowns, linens, scrubs—into visual artworks that “do illness.” Simultaneously research-creation and public disability arts engagement, we analyze how the pop-up galleries in the Frictions project reveal tensions that surround the ways that knowledge in medicine is made il/legitimate. This leaves us to consider how we move from knowledge as a revelatory force to knowledge as transformative while remaining embedded within the structures and spaces of science and art. Like many categories, the labels of art and science order social worlds and knowledge communities. Here we explore what happens when the expected domains, spaces, and materialities of these categories are transposed and consider what futures materialize when transplant medicine is brought into conversation with multimodal artistic practices and curation.