Art-Icon will stage “Love,” a large-scale exhibition examining the construction of intimacy and emotional representation in contemporary culture, at the Bastille Design Center in Paris from May 26 to 28. Organized during one of the busiest moments of the city’s cultural calendar between Nuit des Musées and Paris Gallery Weekend, the exhibition brings together established figures in contemporary art alongside more than 200 emerging international photographers.
Curated by Danila Tkachenko and Slavica Veselinović, the project approaches love not as a private emotional condition, but as what the curators describe as “an anthropology of simulated affect.” Rather than framing intimacy through sentimentality, the exhibition examines how emotions are increasingly mediated through images, commercial aesthetics, advertising, and digital culture. According to the exhibition text, contemporary experiences of love have become “cataloged and packaged into serial scenarios,” transforming emotional expression into a reproducible visual language.
The exhibition’s conceptual framework positions visual culture itself as both subject and critique. Through photography, video art, installation, and performance, “Love” investigates the distance between authentic attachment and culturally imposed emotional archetypes. The curatorial approach juxtaposes commercialized representations of tenderness, sexuality, motherhood, obsession, and suffering in order to expose what the exhibition describes as the “artificiality” of contemporary emotional imagery.
Among the exhibition’s central participants are ORLAN, whose work continues her long-standing interrogation of identity and the body, and Marina Abramović, who will present her seminal 1975 performance video Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful. Ai Weiwei contributes a rare selection of early erotic drawings examining desire and body politics, while Roger Ballen presents psychologically charged works probing the darker dimensions of human consciousness.
The exhibition also incorporates a broad range of contemporary photographic practices. Alisa Resnik presents nocturnal photographic works centered on intimacy and melancholy, while Zoë Urness explores Indigenous motherhood through cinematic visual narratives. Lindsay Elizabeth Warner will unveil a twelve-meter installation built around intimate portraits of musician Marilyn Manson, examining parasocial relationships, obsession, and fandom as contemporary forms of emotional projection.
Additional contributors include Jacob Aue Sobol, exhibiting stark black-and-white portraiture, and curator Marat Guelman alongside the collective ± Komma, whose AI-assisted project First of all, it’s beautiful reframes the image of nuclear catastrophe through aesthetic detachment and collective anxiety. Paris-based painter Dominique Renson also participates in the exhibition, which ultimately expands into a large-scale survey of emerging international image-makers.
Installed across more than 1,000 square meters inside the 19th-century Bastille Design Center, the exhibition merges industrial architecture with contemporary exhibition design. Public access runs from May 27 to 28, with an opening reception taking place on May 26 at 19:00. Admission is free, with attendance restricted to visitors aged 18 and older.
Bastille Design Center, 74 Bd Richard-Lenoir, 75011 Paris, France
Photos: Courtesy of Art-Icon | Marina Abramović, Danielle Fitzgerald and Lindsey Elizabeth Warner
Comments are closed.