Klitsa Antoniou / The Controversy of Empathy in the Visual and Performative Arts

Klitsa Antoniou, Multimedia Installation, Monagri Foundation, 1999, Cyprus

Klitsa Antoniou investigates empathy in the Visual and Performative Arts and one's ability to understand or feel the experience of others from his/her own perspective. Empathy is a complex term with various fields of application in neurology, psychology and philosophy, while constituting a very important tool in everyday (non-verbal) communication. In particular, this is defined as emotional identification, the perception of the position in which another person has entered, a way of understanding his behavior and deeper motivations.

We live in a society that is overwhelmed by information and news and intense reflection is created by the selective display of empathy towards people of different nationalities or beliefs and the shift of human attention by the media and political actors to only certain conflicts and tragedies leaving other equally or even more important incidents in the darkness of non-promotion. Antoniou in her lecture is questioning how specific and personal a story or project should be to activate compassion.