2016 CCA Biennial: Abject/Object Empathies

Overview

With a focus on the cultural production of empathy, the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA) opens its second campus-wide art exhibition by addressing the ways in which feeling is form.

The 2016 biennial, titled Abject/Object Empathies, includes 12 new projects, developed over 12 months by artists working in a variety of ways that suggest how the objects, buildings, interfaces, and images we construct are shaped by the intentional or implicit emotional, interdependent relationship to others. Whether by framing a connection that already exists or by providing the condition for new human connection, all projects consciously bridge the distance between self, object, and other — insisting, through the work's form, that aesthetic experiences are fundamentally interdependent, collaboratively generated, or inherently reciprocal.

Ideas of interdependent form in art have been addressed recently in theories of relational and participatory practices, but theories of art's intentional acknowledgement of the other — whether viewer, audience, citizenry, crowd, or globe — is often understood as rhetorical anticipation rather than actual coauthorship. Yet there are historical roots of aesthetic experience in social experience, providing an opportunity to return to this earlier understanding of form to resolve a contemporary tension between social practice and the making of objects. It is the structure of inter-subjective experience, which now includes participatory networks and collective platforms of exchange, which has given rise to art practices that do not necessarily reject form, as much as they seek ways to define the political, cultural, and societal distinctions between "me" and "we" in material ways.

Between September 15 and December 22, CCA biennial projects will be open across campus in public spaces and departmental galleries, including installations on the Arts Quad, Willard Straight Hall, Mann Library, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Sibley Hall Dome, and Klarman Hall Atrium.

The biennial will open on September 15 with a talk by biennial artist in residence Pepón Osorio and a three-day presentation of talks, workshops, and events by artists, scholars, and students who have work in the exhibition.

Please see the CCA biennial website for specific event dates, project locations, and a list of scheduled speakers.