Programmed by curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, the seventh Satellite cycle at Jeu de Paume goes by the title of «Tales of Empathy», and sets out to explore the specificity of reflexive work by woman artists and their engagement as «educators», researchers and activists. For the second exhibition in this cycle «Similar», artist Natascha Sadr Haghighian has been invited to conceive a work specially for the Maison d’Art Bernard Anthonioz.

Taking as her subject a branch fallen from a tree in the grounds of the Maison d’Art, which goes from an animated to an inanimate state, the artist explores beholders’ mimetic capacities as they are invited to recognise familiar expressions in the various transformations of the object. Referring to Walter Benjamin’s doctrine of the similar, Sadr Haghighian questions the principle of empathy, or the human capacity to produce and perceive similarities.