Image from Unsplash by Thierry Meier

The slipperiness of empathy: navigating through seas of (in)visibility and erasure

Fri 31 January

Alison Richard Building

The symposium explores visibility and erasure within the context of mobility control, the global border regime, and histories of empire. Bringing together artists, curators, and researchers, this trans-disciplinary symposium takes multi-sensorial, creative practices as a crucial point of departure. Our aim is to open the door for conversations on how artwork can offer a novel perspective that goes beyond traditional institutional frames and dominant ways of producing knowledge. We will begin with an interdisciplinary panel discussion, followed by a soundscape workshop and interactive walk around a curated exhibition featuring the work from invited artists.

??Framing visibility and erasure as two sides of the same coin, the symposium aims to challenge and complicate the violence that leads to the relative presence or absence of specific representations, modes of being, and knowledges within museums, galleries, universities, public spaces, and archives. Placing a particular emphasis on affect, empathy, and spectacle, we question how these spaces give expression to violences without continuing to restrict or efface otherness, in what Saidiya Hartman calls ‘the slipperiness of empathy’ (Hartman 2018).

We anchor the symposium in the sea – as an expansive, continuous space of imagination, connectivity, and possibility yet also a precarious site of loss and fragmentation. This framing provides a conceptually rich and visually compelling entry point to reposition the sea as an active participant in the creation, reconfiguration, and maintenance of racialising histories and geographies that permeate contemporary border regimes. The sea invites us to think critically, creatively, and sensorially through currents, ripples, and waves that co-exist, interrupt, and surge forward into moments of stillness and calm.

On 30 January there will be a performance of [A house made of water] introducing the themes of the symposium.

Please be aware that the event may include discussions around and depictions of displacement, violence, and trauma which some individuals may find distressing. We will offer a content warning in advance of explicitly violent material, if necessary.

Cost: FREE