‘I am not a statistic:’ Pop-up exhibit highlights crisis in long-term care
Artists advocate for residents, workers with display on museum’s windows
Documentary photographer and filmmaker Kitra Cahana has been advocating on behalf of residents and workers in long-term care centres since the COVID -19 pandemic started because her father, Rabbi Ronnie Cahana, is a longtime resident of one such place — the Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Côte-saint-luc.
A petition she launched with three other women in April to protect those in long-term care has gathered nearly 70,000 signatures, she has assembled an advocacy tool kit for families and friends of residents and started a Facebook group for families of residents of Maimonides.
“As I started to do more activism in this realm, it became clear to me that there was very little about this issue out there,” Cahana, 32, said this week in an interview. “I didn’t see people talking about long-term care facilities with the same energy as other initiatives.”
To that end, she and fellow documentary photographer and filmmaker Isadora Kosofsky co-founded Artists 4 Long-term Care, a social action initiative that uses art and storytelling to raise awareness about conditions facing residents and staff in these facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
Now Artists 4 Long-term Care and the Museum of Jewish Montreal have mounted a pop-up exhibition in several of the museum’s large storefront windows — 32 images including photographs, posters and testimonies from residents and workers in long-term care centres, with contributions by local and international artists and photographers.
“I see this cause as fighting against ageism, against ableism and against racism, because so many of the workers are women of colour,” said Cahana, born in Florida and raised in Sweden, Toronto and Montreal, where her father was the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth-el in Town of Mount Royal until a devastating brain-stem stroke in 2011. She spoke to The Gazette from Tucson.
One of the most powerful images in the exhibit is Cahana’s photograph of her parents. It was shot in her father’s room at Maimonides, where he has lived for eight years, and it is accompanied by a letter from him to Quebec Premier François Legault.
“I am not a statistic,” writes Rabbi Cahana, 66. “I am a fully sentient, confident human being, who needs to have my humanity honoured. These days, in longterm care, every person is speaking desperately to the Maker Of Us All, to The Holy Creator of Life, and we’re pleading for our lives . ... We’re afraid that society is forgetting us: our life-force, our dignity, our ownership of the love of life that we can teach others.”
The installation can be viewed from the sidewalk outside the museum space, at St-laurent Blvd. and Duluth Ave., until June 30, when the museum officially vacates its bricks-and-mortar site. The space, closed to the public since March because of the pandemic, has been sold. Until it finds a new location, the museum will exist only online.
“We felt that, as long as we have a physical venue to share a message as important as this one, we must use it,” said museum director Zev Moses.
“Even in our own crisis, we want to acknowledge the broader crisis.”
An already dire situation in longterm care centres has been exacerbated by the pandemic, said Samantha Garritano, a Montreal-based multidisciplinary creator (her arts moniker is Sultana Bambino) who curated and designed the exhibit, “and we are ignoring it as a society.”
The installation includes infographics, statistics and quotes by people explaining their experience and it was important to her that it be a call to action, said Garritano, whose grandfather is a resident of Maimonides.
The plan is to print more posters and find other places in Montreal to hang images, “so that no one can turn away from this reality,” Cahana said.
“My belief, and the reason I wanted to put up testimonies and artwork in the streets of Montreal, is that I think this entire situation was preventable.”
Among measures in Quebec she believes would have helped are frequent and comprehensive testing of all residents and staff in longterm care centres, which she noted has still not been implemented, mandating the wearing of personal protective equipment earlier among patient attendants and preventing movement of workers between sites, as was done in British Columbia. There have been far fewer deaths in long-term care facilities in BC than in Quebec.
But the pandemic has taken a huge toll on elderly Canadians in long-term care as a group. The National Institute on Aging reported that, as of May 6, 82 per cent of the 4,167 COVID-19 deaths were in long-term care settings.
I see this cause as fighting against ageism, against ableism and against racism, because so many of the workers are women of colour.