Private View: 22 January 2026

Exhibition from 22 January – 20 February 2026 in the Stephen Lawrence Gallery

Monsters of Radical Empathy brings together creative practice and conversation drawn from explorations and discussions during the 2023 Venice Biennale. In response to a brief set by Marina Otero and Rahesh Ram at the first ever Venice Biennale College, seven participants from Croatia, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, Mauritius, South Africa and Uganda, along with the creators of the brief, inhabited the intertidal terrains of Venice, explored the city and the nearby islands, engaged with local craftsmen, and produced new embodied understandings of the cartographies of the lagoon. Bridging their own backgrounds with the histories, myths, and rumours present on the city and the lagoon, the group investigated how to make space for mythic and monstrous fabulations. Drawing from indigenous knowledges, walking together as an embodied practice, environmental listening, and their own lived experiences and inner worlds, each participant conducted a series of multi-scalar investigations into their bodies, local materials, local crafts, Venice as a city, the lagoon as a landscape, and planetary storytelling as a form of resistance to cartesian logics and other forms of colonial oppression.