Lynette Walworth brings empathetic art. That takes some getting used to at the Holland Festival

A TED Talk, but not 15 minutes as prescribed by that scattershot ideas organisation, but an hour and a half. In How To Live (After You Die), the monumental artist Lynette Walworth takes you through a story-with-light images about the temptations of sectarian belief, which ends, via the Amazon and the Outback, over Donald Trump and along the steppes of Mongolia, in the caves of Lascaux. It is storytelling, a term already a little out of fashion, and akin to the full-length conference as we know it from Dutch cabaret.

But Lynette Walworth, the celebrated multimedia artist who is even a member of the World Economic Forum, does not do cabaret. At least not in the sense we give it in the Netherlands: How To Live (After You Die) doesn't 'chafe' or put you on a different footing every 15 minutes, nor does it slap you in the face in a confrontation with your own ingrained ideas. On the contrary, Walworth strives for empathy, even in a story about the devastating effects of sectarian belief, of which she herself has been a victim.

My Little Pony

That the occasional dash of pink lettering appears in the light images may make it more My Little Pony than the Holland Festival audience can handle, but at the same time shows that Walworth does not want to speak only to the cultural elite. This story builds bridges and at the same time makes one miserable. For, no matter how familiar the seduction and indoctrination techniques of cult leaders are, when, as she makes crystal clear, they take control of ever larger parts of the world's population via social media, we should fear for the future.

After all, anyone who has ever tried knows that it is impossible to engage in a meaningful discussion with believers in Jehovah, Jordan Peterson, Willem Engel or Donald Trump, since you have been skillfully made an enemy and thus treacherous devil much before, and your reasonable arguments have been rejected before you can even bring them up.

That future, another of Walworth's works makes clear, is also one in which women and children will still be victims of those male-started civil wars and revolutions that sectarianism leads to.

End of fear

Evolution of Fearlessness is a small installation, on show in the darkened small hall of the Muziekgebouw, in which you are confronted with the stories of women who survived their flight from genocide, hunger and war.

As in 'How To Live', stillness reigns in 'Evolution'. That great TED Talk is a meditative service, 'Evolution' is like a tranquillising chapel in the overheated, mass-tourism raped global village that Amsterdam is again this summer.

Again, the source is suffering and horror, but the goal is not anger. Just as Walworth herself found a way out of the suffocating world of the Christian sect she fell into as a shaky teenager, the women in Evolution of fearlessness are, as the title suggests, past their fear. They have felt, experienced, seen the horrors, and once you have survived that, fear is something that becomes part of that same past.

Machismo

It is a noble pursuit of empathy that Walworth makes us feel, in a world where so much is happening that can infuriate you, or make you despair, like Rosefeldt's Euphoria makes clear with a few solid sledgehammer blows.

What Anohni, this Holland Festival's associate artist, manages to do with Walworth's introduction to down-to-earth Dutch audiences, at least, is to raise the suspicion that there is a world in which female forces could nicely counterbalance the machismo of which our society seems so pervasive.