Empathy Gym explores the work of empathy. Often understood as a human capacity, the works in Empathy Gym extend the boundaries of understanding into areas and interactions usually felt as remote or unintelligible to human experience.
Jessie Turner's hypnotic photographic series How Animals See Death draws on scientific research, speculation and anecdotal observation to expand and challenge our assumptions of non-human species’ consciousness, sentience, and understanding of death.
Tom Richards, a Melbourne-based artist and experience designer, reanimates a receipt printer in his work The Cost. Continuously printing live-streamed climate data as a series of itemised receipts, the work confronts us with the interconnectedness of human actions and environmental outcomes.
Daryoosh Karimi, an Iranian-Australian sound artist, explores the relationship between automation and humanity. In We Can Sympathise with Each Other, an audiovisual work built around the electroacoustic technique of phase shifting, two repeated voices continually drift in and out of alignment. Their yearning for fleeting moments of unison echo the device of the double and express the sincere, yet ultimately impossible, desire to fully understand one another, and even aspects of ourselves.
Opening the exhibition is a dual performance by Layla Meadows, Layla & Sam / Sam & Layla, in which mirroring becomes both choreography and conversation—a delicate act of balance and interpretation.
Empathy Gym is the first exhibition in SHIVERS Gallery’s 2026 program: Back to the Unconscious. Supported by Arts Merri-bek through the Flourish Arts Grant.
Shivers Gallery is easily accessible with public transport (Upfield line, Trams 19 and 6) and is located at Moreland. Free parking is available on Davies Street or after hours in a council carpark behind the Gallery. There are no accessible toilets or ramps, but just one small step to get into the ground floor gallery. Assistance and guide dogs very welcome. Accessible tours (voice only, not Auslan) are available with pre-booking.
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