Overview

Compassion and Inconvenience combines artist Vika Kirchenbauer’s 30-minute video work Compassion and Inconvenience (2024)—with its script reproduced alongside stills and audio descriptions—and her essay Instituting Inconvenience and Colonial Relations: The Genesis of European Contemporary Art Institutions in Mid-18th Century London (2025). Both these contributions engage with the historical context of the cultural scene in mid-18th-century London, when the first public presentation of contemporary art took place. In a setting inextricably entangled with early capitalism and British colonialism, an emergent artistic elite fundamentally influenced how, for whom, and under what conditions contemporary art entered the public sphere. As part of this genesis, moral philosophical concepts and artists’ feelings—most distinctly around compassion and inconvenience—played important parts in inserting imaginings of superiority and constellations of dominance into the core of European notions of art and taste. By deepening into the historical roots of contemporary art exhibitions, this reader examines the conditions under which what we now consider self-evident came into being.

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