ANU School of Art & Design Forum | Brianne Cohen

[Alex Burchmore]

Brianne Cohen | The Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia

Tuesday 10 March, 1-2pm (ANU Sir Roland Wilson Building Theatrette, Room 2.02)

 

Full details here: https://soad.cass.anu.edu.au/events/art-design-forum-brianne-cohen

 

 

This talk will introduce Brianne’s forthcoming book, The Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia (University of Minnesota Press, 2026). Examining a range of photography and video work, The Empathic Lens explores how lens-based projects in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Singapore are responding to increasingly urgent concerns related to climate disaster and capitalist acceleration—specifically by cultivating deeper feelings of empathy toward the environment. As each artist takes their lens to these realities, Brianne shows how they draw on Indigenous knowledge and local traditions that have long recognized the kinship and interdependency of humans and nonhumans. Her book engages often-censored discourses of Indigenous land relations and environmental justice in a region with a long history of colonial and neocolonial development, tracing genealogies of empathy and animism to demonstrate how such artwork offers sustainable visions for the future coexistence of planetary life.

 

Brianne Cohen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Colorado

Boulder, where she focuses on contemporary art, visual culture, socio-environmental justice, and the formation of critical publics in Southeast Asia and Europe. Her books include The Empathic Lens: Art, Animism, and Ecology in Contemporary Southeast Asia (University of Minnesota, forthcoming in fall 2026), Don’t Look Away: Art, Nonviolence, and Preventive Publics in Contemporary Europe (Duke, 2023) and the co-edited volumes, Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects and Prospects (Amherst, 2023) and The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Cornell, 2016).

 

Image: Tuan Andrew Nguyen, My Ailing Beliefs Can Cure Your Wretched Desires (2017), two-channel video installation.

 

Hope some of you can make it to this!

 

Best wishes,

 

Alex

 

Dr Alex Burchmore

Senior Lecturer & Honours/MA Convenor, Art History and Curatorial Studies

Co-Convenor, Australasian Network for Asian Art, 2023-26

 

Centre for Art History and Art Theory

School of Art and Design, College of Arts and Social Sciences

Sir Roland Wilson Building

The Australian National University

Canberra ACT 2600

 

Author of New Export China: Translations Across Time and Place in Contemporary Chinese Porcelain Art (University of California Press, 2023) and Material Selves: Object Biographies and Identities in Motion (Bloomsbury, 2024)

 

My latest exhibition reviews:

‘Tracing the long history of Aboriginal-Chinese people in Australia, through archives and art,’ The Conversation, 19 January 2026 – featured on ABC Canberra

‘Standing on giants: A new generation rises at the National Indigenous Art Triennial,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December 2025

Archived copies of older writing can be found here

 

 

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The Australian National University acknowledges, celebrates and pays our respects to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people of the Canberra region and to all First Nations Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and work, whose cultures are among the oldest continuing cultures in human history