From Empathy to Benevolence
Summary
95
Empathy
Winter 2019
Given the problems we face in the twenty-first century, the capacity to appreciate the feelings and emotions of others would appear to be a potential antidote to excessive individualism and the allure of withdrawing into one’s own identity. But can empathy really change the world? This issue examines empathy in the context of contemporary creation and seeks to determine whether art can contribute to building sensitive bridges between people that are geographically, socially, and culturally distant and whose experiences differ.
Editorial
Feature
With Open Eyes: Affective Translation in Contemporary Art
Opacity Against the Abuses of Empathy
To Empathize is the Question
The Automation of Empathy
Muscular Empathy and Not Knowing in Dara Friedman’s Mother Drum
Victoria Lomasko and the Graphic Language of Empathy
Flat Death Jest: Julia Martin’s Performatist Aesthetics of Empathy
Inside and Outside the System : Artists Against Prisons
ATSA: When Art Reaches Out
Portfolios
Columns
Reviews
Current Issue
Immersion
Winter 2026
This issue is interested in all forms of immersion in contemporary art. How are artists critically engaging with immersive technologies? Conversely, what kinds of practices are challenging technology in their pursuit of immersion? How are these experiences breaking down the boundaries between spectator, body, and art? We put forward proposals that rely on listening and sustained attention rather than on amplification and sensory overload – works using devices that are sometimes relatively simple and non-invasive, sometimes a little more elaborate, but in which participation is, with a few nuances, neither passive nor devoid of critical thinking.
Cover: doux soft club
bleu de lieu, 2023-2024.
Photo: Cléo Sjölander, courtesy of the artists