Susan Sontag's essay Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) questions the widespread assumption that images of suffering and violence automatically generate compassion and motivate political reaction or action. More than twenty years after its publication, the text reads as ahead of its own time, an analysis of a world Sontag herself had not yet known. Joining the conversation on the critical potentials and shortcomings of empathy are Alona Karavai and Vanessa Oberin.
The discourse series conversation pieces takes everyday technologies as its starting point and situates them in the context of the swimming pool. Each edition departs from a text that sets the thematic frame and serves as a shared point of reference.
Alona Karavai is a cultural manager and curator from Ukraine, co-founder of the project space Asortymentna Kimnata in Ivano-Frankivskand the media about art post impreza. She worked in the contemporary art center Izolyatsia while it was based in Donetsk, till she had to flee. Following the forced relocation, she co-founded a few artistic initiatives, among which the School of Contemporary Art fra fra fra dealing with emergency art residencies as well as programs for refugee artists and artists after/during combat experience in Ukraine. She is based in Kyiv and works with the topics of peripheries, absence, as well as vitality and death.
Vanessa Oberin is a scholar of art and media studies working as a lecturer and writer in Berlin. Her research interests span theories of the body, the senses, and affect, media aesthetics, and contemporary art. From 2018 to 2023 she was a research associate in the research college "Sensing: On the Knowledge of Sensitive Media" at the Brandenburg Centre for Media Studies (ZeM) in Potsdam. Since 2024 she has been teaching in the European Media Studies programme at the University of Applied Sciences and University of Potsdam. She is currently completing her doctoral project Kunst des Hineinversetzens: Ambivalenzen einer zeitgenössischen Medienästhetik der Empathie (The Art of Empathetic Projection: Ambivalences of a Contemporary Media Aesthetics of Empathy).
The discourse series conversation pieces is a cooperation between Tropez and transmediale, curated by Anna-Lena Panter.
