Exploring empathy performativity in students’ video artworks

Abstract

This article examines events of empathy as they occur during artmaking using the lens of agential realism. We do this to trouble more traditional psychological constructs of empathy and, instead, rethink it as performative and relational. Drawing on new materialisms and Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism’, we do not treat artmaking, young people and empathy in any hierarchy but want to understand how these come together as ‘things-in-phenomena’. Written recountings of a video artwork are used in mapping the entanglements of cats and dogs with three Finnish high-school girls as they answer the question ‘what is empathy?’. The study shows how objects/materials/matter(s) are agentic in co-constituting conditions invocative of empathy phenomena during artmaking. We conclude by suggesting that an agential realist account of art and empathy calls for art educators to pay close attention to objects/materials/matter(s) in their heterogenous connections.