Adrian Parr’s BDE #12 (l.) with Liu Shiming’s Old Lady Touching Her Head. Courtesy the artist and Liu Shiming Art Foundation

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.

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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........

© Observer