An interactive exhibit at the Michael C. Carlos Museum aims to become a quiet refuge from the uncertainty of today’s world.
“Compassion: What Moves You?” invites guests to explore a sequence of three galleries of different installations that encourage reflection on our shared humanity. The exhibit runs through Oct. 25, anchoring upcoming lectures, book clubs and other events from Emory College’s Year of Compassion initiative dedicated to empathy, healing and human connection.
“Compassion manifests in times of conflict. That’s when you need it the most,” says Brendan Ozawa-de Silva, an associate teaching professor in Emory’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, known as the Emory Compassion Center.
“When the response to violence is not more violence but compassion, that is the surprise manifestation of our deepest humanity, to connect even when things look the worst,” adds Ozawa-de Silva, who co-curated the exhibit with the Carlos Museum’s facilitating curator Andi McKenzie and Jennifer Knox, director of character education and Ron M. Brill Chair of Ethical Leadership at Atlanta’s Woodward Academy.
The front galleries emphasize human connections with a photo essay from Japanese photographer Shingo Kanagawa on his search to understand his long-absent father. The Japanese artist collective ARu Inc. will display an installation from Kosuke Matsushima, Masahi Fujimoto and Ryoji Yukin, which illuminates visitors’ heartbeats into an ever-evolving collective light sculpture.
“The idea is simple, but the experience is profound, because the sculpture does not exist without all of us together,” Knox says. “As individual heartbeats gather into a collective pulse, we are reminded that compassion arises through interdependence.”
Matsushima and Fujimoto were on campus to oversee installation and train students, docents and staff to help guide visitors into the installation. Matsushima discussed the piece and its themes of connection during a curatorial conversation with Ozawa-de Silva and Knox held in conjunction with the exhibit’s opening.
A video installation from interdisciplinary artist Héctor Alvarez from Emory’s Theater Studies department will greet visitors in the middle galleries. The wordless piece, “The Water Station,” offers a slow meditation on our ability to be moved when others are in need.
The gallery also displays a rubber bullet like the one that blinded Richard Moore as a child growing up in Northern Ireland. Moore’s decision to forgive the British soldier who shot him earned worldwide praise, including admiration from His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, a Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory.
Visitors will be encouraged to reflect on our shared humanity in the final gallery. The space features photographs that Knox and McKenzie selected from the museum’s permanent Works on Paper collection, including recent acquisitions such as Radcliffe Bailey’s “UNIA” and José Ibarra Rizo’s “Santiago.”
The images appear alongside Youth Voices — hand-drawn reflections Knox selected from pre-K through college students from around the world who have participated in the Compassion Center’s Social, Emotional and Ethical (SEE) Learning program, answering the prompt, “What moves you?”
Emory students designed and will maintain the last component of that gallery, a Compassion Lab. The lounge-like area allows visitors to linger and discuss the experience, draw or write their own answer to the SEE-Learning prompt and to reflect on how to actively renew their compassion upon leaving. Responses will inform students’ ongoing research at Emory on compassion and values.
Senior sociology major Ashley Fan is one of the students who worked to fashion the space based on student researchers’ experiences in Ozawa-de Silva’s Social Empathy Lab. There, students find common ground through games, active conversation and shared goals.
“We want empathy to be an experience that evokes action,” Fan says. “Our hope is that people enter the space and truly feel the transition and experience of each step. If they come out and see their lives a little differently, then I believe we have done our job.”
Year of Compassion events
The Carlos Museum will host and co-sponsor several events this semester to highlight the “Compassion: What Moves You?” exhibit. Highlights include:
- Carlos Reads Book Club discussion of “Pachinko,” by Min Jin Lee: Monday, Feb. 16, at 7:30 p.m. in the Carlos Museum Board Room. Lee will deliver the 2026 Richard Ellmann Lectures on March 1-3 at the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts.
- Nix-Mann Endowed Lecture with Richard Moore: Sunday, March 22, at 3 p.m.in the Carlos Museum’s Ackerman Hall