Conflict is part of our lives.
How can we live conflicts differently?

Radical Empathy begins with the understanding that empathy is not soft, neutral, or given. It is learned, practiced, and risked.

The exhibition explores queer artistic practices as sites of radical empathy, understood not as passive emotional identification but as a relational and transformative engagement with difference.
Drawing from queer history, progressive ethics of care, and contemporary art practices, “Radical Empathy” examines how queer art creates conditions for empathy that resist assimilation, challenge heteronormative perspectives, and center lived experience as a vital form of knowledge.
Queer artists and collectives frequently work from positions of historical exclusion, using art as a means of survival, connection, and world-building. In this context, “Radical Empathy” moves beyond the notion of simply “feeling for” another; it emphasizes a willingness to remain open to discomfort, to difference, and the possibility of being transformed through encounter.

* The exhibition instinct#20 Radical Empathy serves as an artistic reflection on two we are village projects, Conflict and Resilience and Queer Connect.

Bringing these earlier initiatives into dialogue, instinct#20 Radical Empathy revisits their ideas, processes, and contexts, transforming them into a new curatorial framework that invites renewed interpretation.