Adrian Parr’s Intimate Response to an Unthinkable World

<img decoding="async" class="size-full-width wp-image-1611743" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2026/01/interview-Adrian-Parr-Zaretsky-Liu-Shiming-exhibition-venice-intimate-unthinkables.png?w=970" alt="A side-by-side pairing of an abstract painting on the left with organic, almost human lines and a terra cotta statue of a curvy human on the right" width="970" height="647" data-caption='Adrian Parr&#8217;s <em>BDE #12</em> (l.) with Liu Shiming&#8217;s <em>Old Lady Touching Her Head</em>. <span class=”media-credit”>Courtesy the artist and Liu Shiming Art Foundation</span>’>

We are living in an era of what Adrian Parr calls “unthinkables.” From climate collapse and ecological degradation to displacement and war, the litany of political and social fractures generating headlines can feel relentless. But in “Intimate Unthinkables,” which opens this spring at the European Cultural Centre during the 2026 Venice Biennale, the artist and UNESCO Chair invites a reimagining of the unthinkable grounded not in despair, but in care. The exhibition pairs Parr’s conceptual paintings with the tender, humanist sculpture of Chinese modernist Liu Shiming in a timely dialogue that explores themes of empathy, embodiment and collective resilience.

Though more widely recognized for her leadership in sustainable design and water justice, Parr’s artistic practice is as wide-ranging as her work in sustainability culture and climate politics. Materially oriented, she engages with mediums as diverse as paint, soil and film to tell powerful stories of environmental and social collapse. Her curatorial work is similarly expansive, bringing together art, design, ecology and philosophy. “Intimate Unthinkables” will explore not only global upheaval—something Parr engages with across her oeuvre—but also life, the body and the power of humanity. A pioneer of modern Chinese sculpture, Liu Shiming developed a distinctive visual language rooted in everyday life, resisting both socialist realism and Western modernist mimicry to find power in small gestures, domestic spaces and the comfort of the body.

The pairing is both aesthetic and ideological. The organic curves and obscured figures in Parr’s watercolor-and-soil paintings mirror Liu’s empathetic figurative sculptures in not only their intimacy but also their embodied resilience, offering a counternarrative to global antagonism—one that foregrounds our shared humanity and the opportunity for reconnection. “Futurity, as the exhibition proposes, is not a fixed horizon but a collective invitation: to envision alternate realities, to remember that neither social conflict nor environmental degradation are inevitable,” Parr told Observer. “‘Intimate Unthinkables’ is hopeful precisely because it locates this potential within the everyday, within the gestures of care, endurance and connection that persist even in the midst of upheaval.”

As both curator and exhibiting artist, she brings these practices into conversation to propose a different architecture of connection, through shared memory, material poetics and attention to the ordinary. We connected with her ahead of the exhibition’s opening on May 9 to discuss the origins of “Intimate Unthinkables,” the ethics of cross-cultural dialogue, how art can model care in times of crisis and more.

How did the show’s pairing come about? What particular resonance or tension between your practice and Liu’s work seemed fitting for this dialogue?

I first encountered Liu Shiming’s work nearly two years ago, when I visited an exhibition of his sculptures and drawings at the Shiming Gallery in New York City. I was immediately struck by the sensitivity he brings to documenting the human condition on an intimate scale. I was especially intrigued by his sculptures of women, documenting moments of love, tenderness and laughter. These works held a quiet intensity that stayed with me and hovered around in the background whilst working on the Balagan series during an artist residency I was invited to attend at the Marble House in Vermont. I felt that his practice resonated with the ways in which I explore women’s lives.

At the residency, I began to think about what it would mean to create an installation in collaboration with Shiming, someone whose visual language is so rooted in the aesthetic and sociocultural specificities of Asia and which were produced during a time of profound socioeconomic change in China, in a context quite different from my own. Yet within that difference, I also sensed a shared vocabulary: a way of looking at and sensing gender, intimacy and the everyday gestures that shape our relationships to one another.

The collaboration emerged from that tension and affinity. I wanted to bring our perspectives into conversation with one another in a way that honors the specificity of individual women’s experiences whilst also recognizing the universality of care, connection, strength and vulnerability. The project became an opportunity to explore how two distinct contexts can speak to each other and, in doing so, offer a wider understanding of the intimate forms of resilience that bind us across cultures.

Your notion of “unthinkables” (war, climate emergencies, global conflict) is bleak, but you reference cross-cultural connections as a counternarrative. Is the show more broadly optimistic than the title might make it seem?

The idea of unthinkables is deployed here as both a horizon of possibility and as a mode of critique. The title ”Intimate Unthinkables” inevitably evokes a sense of darkness, of the unthinkable as tied to conflict, loss and the precarity of environmental degradation. Yet my intention is not to dwell in despair, but to open a space where the unthinkable becomes an act of imagination. The exhibition seeks to perforate the boundary between what is thinkable and unthinkable, inviting us to consider how our capacity to imagine is itself constrained by habit, comfort and inherited structures of thought.

What is deemed unthinkable often marks the limits of empathy and vision: our inability to step beyond what feels safe, or to reimagine our relationships to one another, to our collective and specific histories, and to the fragile ecologies we inhabit. In this sense, ”Intimate Unthinkables” becomes a provocation; to move beyond those limits; to exercise imagination as a form of courage and hope. Futurity, as the exhibition proposes, is not a fixed horizon but a collective invitation: to envision alternate realities, to remember that neither social conflict nor environmental degradation are inevitable. It is hopeful precisely because it locates this potential within the everyday, within the gestures of care, endurance and connection that persist even in the midst of upheaval.

The unthinkable, then, is not simply the unimaginable catastrophe; it is also an unimaginable possibility. It gestures toward the yet-to-be-thought, a capacity that is shared across the social field, and an ethical imperative to imagine a world that could be otherwise. I am trying to activate that imagination, to cross the threshold of what seems impossible, and to recognize in our own tenderness, and in our encounters with others, the quiet beginnings of another world.

The show brings together eastern and western perspectives. What do “western” and “eastern” mean in this context, and how do you navigate the risk of reinforcing simplistic binaries?

Thank you for this question; it is an important one. This exhibition brings two artists from two different parts of the world and from distinct cultural positions into conversation, not to reinforce a binary of east and west, but to move beyond it. Rather than staging a cultural contrast, I am seeking a space of encounter, where distinct histories, aesthetics and lived realities meet on their own terms. As postcolonial theory reminds us, the violence of one worldview colonizing another lies in representational erasure: the agency of one group coming at the expense of the agency of another who is denied the opportunity to represent themselves on their own terms. Here, both Shiming and I speak from within our respective contexts; we are each attentive to the textures of ordinary life and the ways in which women’s experiences reveal the pulse of broader social transformation.

Shiming’s work documents a particular moment in China’s history, an era of rapid urbanization and social change. He turns toward the domestic realm, such as women cooking, feeding, mothering, tending and child-rearing. These everyday gestures are both tender yet resilient, and in this way, I see them as quiet acts of resistance. Amid this social upheaval, Shiming reveals how women sustain the fragile fabric of community, how they nurture, nourish and hold life together at the level of the intimate. His work already bridges eastern and western aesthetic traditions, as it is grounded in traditional Chinese techniques and informed by the sensitivity of French Realism.

My work, by contrast, explores how women’s experiences and memories are inscribed by relations of power; how social change and political violence are etched into our flesh and memories. Engaging with the corporeality of women’s experiences, I interrogate the mind–body dualism that has haunted western thought since Plato, turning it inside out. I am inviting the audience into an affective encounter, asking them not simply to look, but to feel, to inhabit the shared spaces of vulnerability, resistance and renewal. I am interested in challenging the hierarchies of gaze and presence, foregrounding the feminist insight that certain experiences and memories are privileged over others and that visibility itself is political.

By entering into conversation with Shiming’s work, I hope to perforate the east–west divide, revealing not opposition but resonance. In this installation, our works converge around the everyday as a site of endurance, where the personal and the social intertwine, where private acts of care resist disappearance. In short, Intimate Unthinkables is a meditation on how women live through change, how the domestic can shelter small acts of resistance to violence through a language of care and feeling; and how together these can become a ground upon which our shared humanity is remade.

Beyond the theme, how does the material expression in the show align with your work as a UNESCO Chair?

My work starts with female experiences and memories; not as images but as fields of history, resistance and renewal. For me, the way women intimately negotiate life produces shared zones of female experience that are both an archive and territories of struggle and contestation. I am working within the spaces and times through which cultural scripts are articulated and rewritten. I am fascinated by how women’s realities have been weaponized and mythologized and contained in idealized forms, but also continue to persist, to push back and reshape their own subjectivities and context. As I work, the materials cooperate in their undoing. The canvas is not a passive layer, but a participant that is kneaded; I use fashion materials, such as feathers, fabric and glitter, not as ornamentation but as a means of disruption. I drag the canvases and paper across interior spaces and outdoor landscapes. I smear the figure with ash, sap and soil. In this way, the materialities of cultural and ecological life intervene in my processes of image making. I think of them as landscape portraits. These acts of wear and accumulation reflect the social codes inscribed into women’s experiences, memories and feelings, and how we are infused by and also push back against social stereotypes and cultural norms. These ecocultural materialities write their own language into the figure, blurring the boundary between where the figure and world begins and ends. In that blurring, I find a kind of agency in the refusal to be neatly constrained or clearly read.

My work’s tension lies in exposure and concealment, fragility and endurance; summoning a kind of perseverance, like the quiet, unending work of carving out spaces of selfhood within systems bent on overdetermining what a woman’s memories, feelings and body can mean. The cultural artifacts, built environments and natural elements such as ash, mud, sap, branches and soil, that I rub into the surface or over which I drag the paper and canvas are not marks of damage but testimonies and evidence of passage, of weathering, and of endurance. Through this, the figure becomes landscape as much as landscape becomes the figure, and the materials (including my own body and physical energy) provide a language of feminist renewal, where beauty and brutality intermingle, where agency is not attained in perfection or clarity, but in the mess, the residue, the becoming.

In respect to the works by Shiming in this exhibition, I am intrigued by the way he relates to the medium of clay with incredible sensitivity and immediacy. The clay, for him, seems to be a medium that bears the struggles of the very histories, labors and gestures of the everyday lives of women living through a time of tremendous social change in China. Given the enormous physical challenges Shiming endured over the course of his life, it is fascinating to me that he chose to work in clay, a medium that demands a great deal of physical exertion. This choice of that medium suggests a conversation between his body’s own limitations and the material’s weight and plasticity, a material that he often dug up himself, so there is also this connection between the constrained physical agency of his own body as realized in conversation with the earth. What struck me about his practice is that this struggle between body, memory, feeling and the land went on to inform an art practice that is infused with an extraordinary sensitivity and honesty. His sculptures of women are not idealistic but emerge from conflicting spaces and times of fragility and strength (a kiss on a park bench, a mother feeding her baby, mother and child holding hands). It’s a balance between the artist’s body, the resistance and weight of the materiality of clay, and the conditions of everyday life. In many ways, my own practice is this: when I drag canvases along the ground, across the floors and walls of my studio or through soil and the forest—when I leave the canvases outside unprotected against the elements and weather—I am negotiating with the materiality and memory of ecological life. Ecological life is a partner in this process; it pushes back, it resists, allowing me to engage with other realities beyond my own comfort zone. Like Shiming, in my work I engage in acts of listening and witnessing, inviting the material world into my thinking and making processes.

Shiming’s sensitivity to the everyday lives of Chinese women, being attentive to their gestures, their work, their joy and endurance, mirrors my interest in the ways women’s bodies embody oppression and agency, exhaustion and grace. In different media and contexts, both Shiming’s clay figures and my well-worn canvases resonate with each other as each attests to the friction between body and world, strength and fragility, the seen and unseen. They are manifestations of persistence, of the quiet kind of resilience that lies within quotidian forms of materiality.

As to how my material expression connects to my UNESCO work, my UNESCO work has been about humanizing big data through philosophical writings, storytelling, moving image, poetry and image making. Throughout my practice, whether it involves painting, drawing, writing or film, I’m interested in the material as a kind of witness to life. The imaginative lines of storytelling, the conceptual spaces of philosophical thinking, and the physicality of matter bear traces of memory, pain, joy, resilience, hope… In the films I have made in my capacity as a UNESCO chair, I explore how women’s memories, experiences and bodies are articulated through systems of poverty and resilience. In this work, I explore the diverse ways that women care for others and themselves, creating community in the process. Whether in Nairobi’s informal communities; or the Native American communities struggling with the effects of climate change and environmental degradation; or the energetic materiality of water flows, the built environment and the weather, I follow how different materialities, bodies, feelings and memories intersect and shape each other. Water, for instance, can possess both life and be a threat to it: water hydrates, floods, infects, heals and it also facilitates all life on earth. For one project I documented the situation of women in three different Native American communities (from Louisiana to Alaska), here I sought to understand through Native American feeling and memory the materiality of water, the sacredness of water and the socially contested zones of water flows, how it carries histories of displacement and renewal.

Often I treat the camera as a porous body of its own, using long takes that allow the rhythms and textures of the world to unfold at their own pace; using overexposure and a drift in time to massage the materiality of film itself by allowing the image to fall apart as it begins to quiver and blur. The material of film in this instance becomes a subject in its own right. For me film making is a process of temporal feeling, and clearly all the years I have spent reading Bergson, Levinas and Deleuze have influenced my approach here. When I drag a canvas through mud, when rain muddles the pigments or bark and sap leave a mark on the paper or canvas, I’m working with the same ethics of collaboration, exhaustion and surrender that inform the films. Materiality is not subservient to representation; it has agency. It intervenes. It alters the image. In this way, the work becomes a place of exchange where human and beyond-human, bodies and land, mingle and mix each other up.

So, the link between my practices stems from the belief that materiality has agency, that the medium, memory, storytelling, experiences and the physical environment are always in dialogue. Whatever ways I can render that entanglement visible and allow the world to write itself into the work, from moving image to pigment and debris, that is what I’m looking for.

In many ways, I’m trying to let the world impress itself on the work, to embrace other forms of knowing and existing, making them visible and audible. Whether through film, where I am following the beleaguered rhythms of a woman fetching large containers of water that they haul or carry across the slums, or mounds of soil that become the matter of the body, I am interested in how the material world offers a testimony to lives that are so often unseen or unheard. The aesthetic disruptions, the grain of film, their overexposure, their stains and scars on canvas are not accidents but acts of recognition. This performance with ideas, stories, memories and experiences produces images that emerge out of a process of material mingling.

Going broader, what do you see the role of art and artists being when it comes to both scholarship and activism?

I’m less interested in art as a vehicle for direct political action, especially in a moment when activism has, in many contexts, become highly polarized. We’re living through a social climate in which opposing political positions often refuse genuine and tolerant engagement; hostility toward difference has become commonplace, even violent. Against that backdrop, I’m interested in the ethical potential of art; its capacity to broaden our horizons, to expand empathy toward people and life forms that fall outside our own frames of reference. My previous exhibition, ”Stop Right There,” also at the European Cultural Center in Venice, took this idea up through a series of larger-than-life close-up portraits of women (hybrid portraits using both my imagination, memories and images from popular culture) whose returned gaze unsettled and reconfigured the dynamic between viewer and viewed. That confrontation, which draws on Levinas’s idea of ethics as realized through a “face-to-face” encounter, is a space where power can shift, and where recognition can occur, where empathy becomes possible.

So, when I think about what has driven me to make art, I think about its ability to massage generosity, curiosity, kindness and thoughtfulness, qualities that feel increasingly endangered by political polarization. Art can create the conditions for more peaceful ways of relating to one another, not by prescribing a stance but by opening up a space in which we can feel and imagine differently. That is the spirit in which this collaboration with Shiming emerged, and the aspiration that continues to guide my work.

And what do you see as the ethical responsibility of curators working today?

I see ethics and curatorial practice as connected by something like an umbilical cord. Ethics is the oxygen and the nutrient flow that sustains any thoughtful exhibition. Curating is never a neutral act; it is a practice that must remain attentive to the complexities, urgencies and silences of the contemporary moment. I believe a curator has a responsibility to nurture the public’s curiosity by opening pathways to previously unheard or unseen histories and experiences, and to do so with care. Exhibitions can orient us toward futurity by reminding us that what has been, and what currently exists, is not fixed, that the world is always open to change if we allow our imaginations to envision more collaborative political, social, environmental, economic and spiritual possibilities. In that sense, curatorial work becomes an ethical invitation: a way of creating space for viewers to reimagine how we might live together with greater tenderness and responsibility.

More Arts Interviews

• Clare McAndrew On Why the Art Market’s Future Lies Beyond the $10 Million Sale

• Zoë Buckman’s Intimate Embroideries Claim Space for Memory, Grief and Jewish Identity

• How Kay Matschullat’s MAX Is Rewriting the Language of Performance in the Age of Techno Art

• At the Bass in Miami, Lawrence Lek’s Odyssey for an Era Shaped by A.I.

• How Uman Channeled a Turbulent Year Into Calm Abstraction