pinned.events

This exhibition reflects on empathy, love and solitude through the idea of the subject as a closed circuit: a being that generates its own layers of reality as protection against the certainty of death. From this perspective, the other is also understood as a construct, a projection shaped by outward appearances and signs of life. The exhibition draws on Theodor Lipps’s early theory of empathy and on Georges Bataille’s view of intimacy as something that cannot be fully expressed in discourse. It presents human relations as a linguistic and social arrangement that helps organize experience while keeping what cannot be represented at a distance. Rather than an exception, solitude is treated here as a basic condition of individual experience. Through drawing, video art and film, thirteen artists from different generations and contexts engage with these questions and with a philosophical tradition that extends from East to West and into the present.