Catholic Universities Art Triennial 2026

The Catholic Universities Art Triennial is an international initiative promoted by the Dicastery for Culture and Education that brings together Catholic universities, artists, curators and cultural institutions from across the world. Conceived as a recurring platform for artistic creation, research and dialogue, the Triennial explores the role of art in addressing the most pressing questions of our time through exhibitions, commissions, publications and public programmes.

Each edition is organised around a central curatorial theme developed collaboratively across multiple cities and institutions. Its inaugural edition, Exercises in Empathy, unfolds across Rio de Janeiro, Santiago, Bogotá, Boston, Lisbon, Milan and Luanda, bringing together an international network of artists, curators and universities to reflect on empathy, human relationships and our shared responsibility through art.

Commissioner
Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See

Chief Curator
Nuno Crespo

Art is a unique form of communication which, since its invention, has been a way of expressing, loving and seeking both the human and the world. Its condition has always been the recognition of the other and the possibility of expressing that other in their singularity. This possibility rests upon our ability to establish an emotional, rational and collective connection between one another—any other and all others. It is an imperative born not only of reason, but also of feeling.

If recognising the other is the basis of every ethical and moral project, it is also the condition of art. Exercises in Empathy is grounded in the conviction that empathy is not simply an emotion but a practice—one that can be cultivated through artistic experience. Art requires relationality, otherness, speaking and listening, showing and seeing. There is no art without empathy.

What we call art is not merely a collection of objects that are more or less accomplished, and which we more or less enjoy, but rather forms that mysteriously condense feelings and provoke emotional and spiritual experiences. Art, with all the mystery that surrounds it, is an experience through which we say things to one another that transcend time, cultures and geographies.

Exercises in Empathy understands artworks as devices of empathy—forms that must be activated, attended to and lived. It understands empathy not as a passive emotion but as an active practice: a human capacity that can be exercised, cultivated and shared. Against the tide of dehumanisation driven by the growing dominance of digital mechanisms, by certain political forces, and by a pervasive deafness that renders dialogue increasingly impossible, Exercises in Empathy affirms art as a space where we may once again learn to feel, to imagine and to recognise one another—and, in doing so, recover the fragile possibility of a shared world.

Nuno Crespo
Chief curator