In her debut documentary Kitten of Vluchteling?, artist and filmmaker Tina Farifteh explores how our capacity for empathy works and to what extent it can be shaped.
Who do you place at the top of your empathy ladder?
Why do we pick up one refugee in our own car while letting another freeze to death at Europe’s borders? Since the start of the war in Ukraine, it has become clear that the lives of white people with blond hair and blue eyes are valued more highly than those of people of color. What mechanisms lie behind this? Who do we place at the top of the empathy ladder when it comes to life and death? Are empathy and xenophobia two sides of the same coin? In Kitten of Vluchteling?, visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker Tina Farifteh investigates the uniquely human (or perhaps not so unique) capacity for empathy, and its limits.
She does so in her own distinctive way. Tina calls herself an obsessive “image collector.” She spends hours every day watching and saving photos and videos, ranging from horrific violence inflicted on people at Europe’s borders to playful kittens and gurgling babies. She marvels at how our attention is constantly being competed for, often by appealing directly to our empathy.
In the film, that experience is recreated inside a gray cube, part exhibition space and part research lab. Experts, test subjects, and empathy “experts by experience” are exposed to a stream of diverse images and interviewed in response. What does empathy mean to them? Are we more empathetic toward one person than toward “the other”? And what effect do images have on this?
The screening will run continuously until 5 May 2024.
Kitten of Vluchteling? is a production by Prospektor in co-production with VPRO, made possible with support from CoBO and Fonds ZOZ.