The art of the heart transplant
A still from Andrew Carnie's “A Change of Heart,” currently on display at Montreal’s Phi Centre. | Photo by Andrew Carnie
Few organs are as charged with meaning as the human heart — and yet the heart is replaceable. Since the first transplant in 1967, the technical aspects have been streamlined, and transplantation is now the standard treatment for end-stage heart failure.
Today, heart transplant recipients live long, healthy lives. But until recently, little inquiry had been made into the emotional or psychological states of the patients after the surgery. A new research collaboration between Concordia researcher Ingrid Bachmann and a Toronto-based medical research group is helping to change that.
The evolving multi-sensory project Hybrid Bodies: An Artistic Investigation into the Experience of Heart Transplantation provides a creative context in which to explore the experiences of organ recipients and their cultural views on transplantation. It links them to ideas of embodiment, identity and kinship.
“In Hybrid Bodies, we looked at how the arts can be used to give voice to heart transplant recipients' experiences, and how these experiences can be incorporated into public discourse,” says Bachmann, an associate professor of fibres and material practices in Concordia’s Department of Studio Arts. “It’s similar to the discourse surrounding phantom limb pain: once we put a name to patient experiences, we'll be better able to discuss them.”
For the project, which was funded in part by the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Bachmann collaborated with the University of Toronto-based Process of Incorporating a Transplanted Heart (PITH) group. Along with an international team of artists — Alexa Wright (University of Westminster), Catherine Richards (University of Ottawa) and Andrew Carnie (University of Southampton) — she reviewed PITH video interviews with post-operation heart transplant recipients.
With the immediate objective of increasing overall public awareness of the complexities of organ transplantation, and the ultimate goal of improving patient care, the artists created works that represented effects of the surgery that they identified in the patients' behaviour.
When Bachmann first saw the footage, she was struck by the small differences between words and actions. “The patients may have said one thing about how they were feeling, but their actions told a different story. Transplant survivors live with paradoxes: ill heart and new heart, donor and recipient.”
Bachmann stresses that the research conducted in Hybrid Bodies is neither art therapy nor medical illustration. “My colleagues and I are working to help bring amazing medical research to a larger public and to broaden the discussion around transplantation.”
The Hybrid Bodies exhibition runs through Saturday, March 15 at Montreal’s Phi Centre (407 St. Pierre St.). Admission is free of charge.