Agents of Concern: Images and Empathy

KRIEG? / PXL-MAD School of Arts, Hasselt (BE), 16 November — 15 December, 2023

Co-curated with visual artist and researcher Toon Leën

How are images used to raise concerns? Why do certain images concern us more than others? And when does the image itself become a cause for concern?

The conference and exhibition project Agents of Concern: Images and Empathy brings together an international group of artists and scholars to examine the complex ways in which images affect our emotional and cognitive understanding of the experiences and mental states of others.

Agents of Concern creates a dialogue between artistic and academic ways of speaking about, with, and to images. Exploring a wide spectrum of visual strategies for evoking empathy, the conference and exhibition contributors address diverse topics including the representation of migration, images of war and political protest, sentimentality in art, contagious images on social media, colonialism, human rights, and the creation of visual evidence.

Participating artists: Harun Farocki, Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Jill Godmilow, Florian Göttke, Jelena Jureša, Tõnis Jürgens, Rabih Mroué, Goda Palekaitė, Frank Theys, and Joeri Verbesselt, Miglė Bareikytė & Natasha Klimenko, Ana Bilbao & Emilie Flower, Reel Borders, Ira A. Goryainova, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, and Dámaso Randulfe.

Conference: Christina Varvia / Forensic Architecture (keynote), Paul Bernard-Nouraud, Filip Berte & Cliona Harmey, Birgit Eusterschulte, Ira Goryainova, Claire Jones, Kasper Lægring, Antigoni Memou, Bart Moens & Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Paula Muhr, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik, Dámaso Randulfe, Amir Saifullin, James Swensen, Stella Viljoen, and Andrew Warstat.

Download the exhibition brochure here.

Download the full conference program here.

The conference on November 16—18 was recorded by PXL Digital Learning Lab. You can find the video recordings of the lectures here.

The conference was made possible by PXL-MAD Research and Hasselt University, in collaboration with PXL-MAD university gallery KRIEG?, the Flemish Government, and Doctoral Schools UHasselt. The conference was initiated and coordinated by Toon Leën. The recordings of the talks came about with the help of PXL Digital Learning Lab.