“The Same Boat”: Replaying Marcelle Hanselaar’s “Crying Game” during the War on Empathy

Here we go again, I thought.  Then again, it is not “same old, same old,” now that the rules of the game have been altered, perhaps permanently. I am talking politics, and I am talking art, in particular Marcelle Hanselaar’s portfolio The Crying Game (2015/17), selections of which I curated in 2023, together with students of my undergraduate curating module, at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University.

Three-and-a-half years have passed since that show, a comparatively short period of time as far as the scheme of history is concerned. And yet, the shifts that have occurred geo-politically are nothing if not seismic. A shift toward fascism throughout South America as well as in my native Germany—a shift, as nasty and brutish as if someone had omitted the “f” in the word, marked by arrogance, ignorance and a recrudescence to the Dark Ages, now on steroids and fuelled largely, but by no means exclusively, by excessive testosterone. I mean, live-streamed executions, anyone?

I needed to respond.  Staging the exhibition The Same Boat: Conflict and Compassion in Prints by Marcelle Hanselaar, was one way of publicly acknowledging the current humanitarian crisis, which is nothing short of an existential crisis in which humans are pitted against the ruthless, non-empathic avatars they have created but do not know how to control.  

The Same Boat, which I guest-curated for/at Gallery Gwyn, Aberaeron, has been derived entirely from Marcelle Hanselaar’s print portfolio The Crying Game.  Returning to that series now enables us to see just how dramatically the world has changed since Hanselaar began to create what was her response to Otto Dix’s 1924 print series Der Krieg.

Russia’s violent assault on Ukraine, Gaza, the Second Trump administration, which is an assault on humanity. All that has “gone down” since then—even though both Trump’s campaign and first term, as well as Brexit were more or less clear signposts of things to come.

In this post, I am going to annotate my introductory text panel for The Same Boat to share my thoughts on the exhibition in relation to the developments in the world at large.

The Same Boat is currently on show at Gallery Gwyn, Aberaeron. Being a costal town, albeit geographically far removed and seemingly sheltered from the English Channel, which is where the “migrant crisis” plays out—and plays into the hands of politicians ready to exploit it.

After staging Crying Bleeding Kicking Screaming with undergraduate students of my curating module at the School of Art in 2023, I felt that I needed to drive home again just how context changes the ways we take in, understand and respond to, work of art. Expressing the rationale in just a few lines is a distinct challenge. Here is how I tried to capture both the work on display at and the task I assigned to myself and.

“This exhibition,” as I put it in my text panel, 

showcases selections from The Crying Game (2015/17), a two-part print portfolio by the Dutch-born, London-based painter-printmaker Marcelle Hanselaar.  It provides an opportunity to encounter—first-hand and up close—the work of an internationally renowned artist whose prints are in the collections of major institutions worldwide, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City among them.

This moment in history,, as I mentioned in my gallery talk with Marcelle Hanselaar on 10 October 2026, would be just the time—the inflection point—at which to exhibit her work at the Met, but I can imagine that right-wing pressures on US institutions are high at the moment, and that conservatism, even in terms that are not radically right-wing, is the preferred modus of the day just to secure funding for the future.

“Hanselaar’s prints,” my gallery text continues,

address what is often left unsaid or what leaves us speechless. They speak to us of violence inflicted on the voiceless and give utterance to acts of silencing. They invite a dialogue about the human condition without claiming the last word.

That, to me, is essential in discourse—discourse that is pretty much lost, but at any rate threatened today.  Fascism is about “claiming the last word,” the word to end all words and to silence opposing views.  Marcelle Hanselaar is opening—provoking—a discussion with prints, and titles, that depend, to some extent, on our participation.

I mean, you cannot be ironic all by yourself, and a print such as He had nothing more to say (2015), which features an older man with his lips sown up and a noose around his neck, makes us question just who determines when speech should no longer be free. He did have plenty to say, of course, but “he”—a generalized but at the same time personified voice of protest—was not permitted to speak up. “You next!” might be a caption for our times.

“The Crying Game draws attention to human rights violations abroad and the displacement that results from them,” my text panel continues:

Three prints featuring improvised migrant boats—Between a rock and a hard place, The promised land, and Where to?—reference a much-politicised ‘crisis’ from the perspective of individuals who see no alternatives to undertaking desperate journeys in search of uncertain safety.

This was the starting point for the exhibition—those three improvised vessels.  How much more pronounced have hostilities towards migrants become since Hanselaar created these prints? What we call a “migrant crisis” is a test for our humanity.  It is a real concern—particularly for those most concerned—that has been weaponized to create mass hysteria in order to enable the far right, which, these days, is about as informed and engaged as maggots are when feasting on a carcass, to assume ascendancy.

As His calculations were all wrong, the first print in The Crying Game portfolio, signals, Hanselaar is especially committed to pointing up the harm that power struggles pose to women and children.  In ‘times of social upheaval,’ she reflects, women ‘often bear the brunt of suffering and exploitation.’

In The Same Boat, scenes from global hotspots of conflict are contrasted with Hanselaar’s responses to challenges faced by communities in Britain, such as knife crimes and drug addiction—realities that complicate our notion of ‘home’ as inherently secure, wholesome, and stable.

This was particularly important to me. I wanted to demonstrate, as Hanselaars prints do, that crises are not imported but ingrained, that the sense of home as a place to be sheltered from outside influences to ensure its healthy development (perceived as purity) is delusional. There are societal problems to be tacked in Britain, and elsewhere, that need to be addressed locally and that cannot reasonably, let alone responsibly, be blamed on external forces.

Apart from being attentive to history in the making, The Crying Game is also rooted in the history of art.  In subject matter and execution, these prints are indebted to Der Krieg, a series of etchings the German artist Otto Dix created just over a century ago in remembrance of the First World War in which he had served willingly.  Like Dix, Hanselaar joins the bitten line of etching with what she calls the ‘poetry of aquatint’ to draw us into nightmarish scenarios that, in her case, are informed by an empathic vision.

Empathy is the ability—and the willingness—to picture ourselves in someone else’s position, to see ourselves in the same boat.  Being ‘bombarded’ with news about acts of aggression, persecution and deprivation, Hanselaar wonders: how would I ‘behave if I’d found myself in such circumstances?’ Imagining situations we are not forced to experience, Hanselaar reasons, enables us to take in ‘what is happening’ without ‘drowning’ in the quagmire of all-consuming terror.

A decade after Hanselaar created The Crying Game, empathy itself has come under attack.  While the ship may not have sailed on humanity, right-wing politicians and self-serving oligarchs seem determined to sink it by assailing our sense of fellowship.  Billionaire Elon Musk—an immigrant by choice—has gone so far as to call empathy a ‘fundamental weakness of western civilization.’

That is why I think revisiting Marcelle Hanselaar’s Crying Game is essential: not because there are new conflicts around the world but because there are challenges to the way in which we respond to them. We are entering a period—the last phase of humanity, perhaps—in which empathy, a human trait, is being phased out, ridiculed as “woke,” condemned and as actively impeded as the rule of law that was binding just in case empathy, or common sense, fails.

Constant exposure to reports from sites of conflict may ultimately desensitise us by creating a sense of sameness and familiarity—a new normal.  Is looking away the answer? Revisiting Hanselaar’s prints, themselves multiples, drives home that repeat engagement with history is not incompatible with seeing anew and remaining alive to what has already been experienced, witnessed, and recorded many times over.

Bombardment with news—which is too often political commentary, these days—may have a deleterious effect on our ability to absorb and respond to historical events in the, and of our, making. That said, the far right, which has strategically undermined our trust in news, is also attacking us with propaganda that, far from making us indifferent, works us into a frenzy and manipulates us into taking just about anyone’s word for an “it” that, owing to AI, is no longer verifiable, much less contestable.

I am grateful to Marcelle Hanselaar and Gallery Gwyn for giving me an opportunity to voice such concerns through works of art that not only not open us up to conversations but that make us alive to our potential for compassion. Is not climate change enough for us to find common ground before it is flooded? Sure enough, the nationalist far right is loudest in denigrating and silencing the call for international cooperation on that front.

Now, Elon Musk has us believe, or at any rate opines, that it is time to depart a spent planet whose resources we have exhausted and whose capacity accommodate all of us we have exceeded. Convenient, is it not, simply to exit—provided you have the money to board a departing flight.

Seeing ourselves in the “Same Boat,” as I see it, may be our last chance at humanity, marred as that concept has been for decades by the patriarchal systems under which “human” was subsumed.

The Same Boat: Conflict and Compassion in Prints by Marcelle Hanselaar is on view at Gallery Gwyn, Aberaeron, until 28 November 2026.