Is there a better place for an exhibition about love than Paris? The city has made that link feel almost obvious. But the real question is what we mean when we talk about love, and which images come first. A kiss, a gesture, a body held in a certain way. These are the pictures that often appear before the feeling itself. Most of them come not from lived experience, but from cinema, advertising, photography and social media.
Arriving today, May 26, at the Bastille Design Center, shortly after Nuit des Musées and just before Paris Gallery Weekend, when art and culture audiences are still carrying the afterglow of museum nights and anticipating the next wave of openings, LOVE, curated by Danila Tkachenko and Slavica Veselinović and presented by Art-Icon, is built around the idea of An Anthropology of Simulated Affect. Bringing together iconic figures alongside more than 200 emerging international photographers, the exhibition spans photography, video, installation and performance. The show includes ORLAN and Marina Abramović, whose work places the body, identity and presence in a space that is never fully private, alongside Roger Ballen’s darker imagery and the more intimate photographs of Jacob Aue Sobol and Alisa Resnik.
What connects these artists is not one definition of love, but the way it keeps turning into images. Intimacy, care, desire and even pain appear in forms that already feel familiar because they have been repeated so often. That makes the exhibition feel less like a group show than a look at a visual habit we rarely stop to question.
The timing matters. Much of life now happens through screens. Private moments are documented, desire is marketed, relationships are performed in public. Before people experience love for themselves, they have already seen countless versions of it. The exhibition sits inside that reality instead of standing outside it.
Opening tonight at Bastille Design Center, 74 Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, Paris, the exhibition is accessible to the public on 27 and 28 May from 12:00 to 20:00, with entry limited to visitors aged 18 and above. A poetry reading featuring Cynthia Ross and Joseph Matick will take place on 27 May at 17:00. Admission is free.
Later,
Florian Müller
