Abstracts

Agata Handley (Bio) and David Allen (Bio)

Levinas and the Ethics of the Aesthetic Encounter: Ross Birrell and David Harding’s Triptych

This paper explores whether art can function as a site of ethics understood as hospitality: a mode of openness to the Other grounded not in recognition or mastery, but in vulnerability, non-knowledge, and attentiveness. Drawing on Levinas’s notion of “authentic” art, not as expression but as radical receptivity, it considers how art might invite, without appropriating, the presence of the Other.

The focus is Triptych (2018), created by Ross Birrell and David Harding and installed in the reconstructed Trinity Apse in Edinburgh. The work brought together multiple “texts” across media, meditating on displacement, trauma, and loss. The starting point was the shared etymology of “fugue” and “refugee,” with resonances of “fugue states.” At its centre, three TV screens presented a recording of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs). The formal structure echoed Hugo van der Goes’s Trinity Altarpiece (1478–79), originally made for the same church.

In one corner stood a music stand holding the score for Quatrain for Solo Violin after Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” by Syrian composer Ali Moraly. The windows were covered by a mosaic of red and blue, evoking stained glass—a chromatic transcription of a score based on lines by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

Rather than seeking to represent suffering or speak for the Other, Triptych played host to these fragmented presences, without collapsing their difference. The artwork was not a self-contained object of interpretation, but a threshold: a site of exposure to alterity, where silence and disjunction became conditions for ethical encounter, and where the viewing position itself was displaced, unseating any stable interpretive centre.

In this way, the work offered a model of aesthetic hospitality, as an openness to disruption, difference, and the untranslatable.

The paper draws in part on an interview with Birrell.