PRACTISING EMPATHY
Embodiment, Perception and Museum Engagement
MOVING SIGNATURES 2026 culminates in a professional practice event on 20 November presented by IMMA Horizons. The afternoon will explore how empathy can be actively cultivated through museum engagement, affective encounters, sensory exploration and somatic enquiry.
Framed alongside IMMA’s exhibition Technologies of Peace: Art and Transition in Contemporary Europe (1989–2026), the event will reflect on questions such as:
- If empathy is a practice, how can it be cultivated in cultural spaces?
- What conditions make empathy possible, and what role do museums play in creating them?
- How can the body serve as a site for unlearning perception and confronting contemporary polarization?
Join IMMA Horizons for an afternoon of artistic practice, critical reflection and collective enquiry exploring these questions in dialogue with their current exhibition.
Programme Overview
- IMMA Horizons and CoisCéim Broadreach: MOVING SIGNATURES Project Film & Panel: Screening followed by a discussion with project participants, Community Arts and Wellness Curator Sundara O’Higgins, and CoisCéim Broadreach Choreographer Jonathan Mitchell.
- Monika Crowley: Presenting Doubt is Beautiful – a practice and research project exploring the everyday as a site of ritual, persistence and meaning-making – and leading a participatory exercise ‘A Stone to Anchor You.’
- Jonathan Mitchell: Leading an integrated movement session exploring the body as a means of attending to ourselves, others, and the worlds we share.
- Daniel Neugebauer: Delivering a critical reflection piece ‘Practising Empathy Between Bodies: Sensing, Politics and Poetics in the Museum.’ At a time of intensifying political polarisation and the resurgence of far right and authoritarian movements, the question of how we encounter difference takes on particular urgency. What can empathy as a practice offer in this context and where are its limits?
Participants are invited to bring along a small stone from where they live, or a place special to them on the day, to contribute to a participatory cairn.
Further information
Technologies of Peace exhibition: https://imma.ie/whats-on/the-technologies-of-peace-1989-2026-exhibition/
IMMA Horizons: https://imma.ie/learn-engage/imma-horizons/
Partners
IMMA Horizons
IMMA Horizons aims to contribute to new thinking on how creativity can positively impact health and wellbeing through programming and partnerships. Extensive research has identified the role of the arts and creative engagement in the promotion of wellbeing across the life course. Building on the strong history of arts and health in Ireland, IMMA Horizons contributes to new research and ongoing conversations in Ireland and globally, advocating for arts experiences to be recognised as an important part of a healthy life.
ABOUT SUNDARA O'HIGGINS
Working as Community Art and Wellness Curator for IMMA Horizons, IMMA's Inclusive Art and Wellbeing programme, Sundara works at the intersection of art, health, ecology and community, drawing on an understanding of the social determinants of health - particularly access, social connection, and the cultural and environmental conditions that enable people to thrive.
Foregrounding equity, sensory, and movement-based engagement, Sundara's work encourages intergenerational participation, cross-museum collaboration, and diverse external partnerships. She co-designs and guides co-created programmes with underrepresented groups and cross-disciplinary partners that open up cultural spaces, foster belonging, and enable participants to engage critically and creatively with the ideas, themes, and material practices that shape the museum context. Ultimately, Sundara views contemporary art as a powerful tool to connect communities, inspire dialogue, improve our health and reshape how we care for ourselves, each other, and the world.
