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Adele & Eva, Begoña del Arco, Slawomir Belina, Veronika Bromova, Simon Costin, Edwin David, Sharon Kivland, Sophia Kosmaoglou, Katarzyna Kozyra, Charles Kriel, Fred Mann, Eulàlia Valldosera Additional Events: 6th of Feb 6pm - Battersea Arts Centre - Veronika Bromova, Czech photography and new media artist talks about her works including the ones in JEUX D'AMOUR 11th of Feb 7 pm - Polish Cultural Institute - Hanka Wroblewska (Zacheta Gallery in Poland) talks about the exhibition + panel discussion 13th of Feb 3pm - Battersea Arts Centre - videoprojection screening of new works by German performance artists Adele&Eva As a tribute to Roland Barthes, "Jeux d´Amour" takes place simultaneously at Battersea Arts Centre and Wigmore Fine Art and brings together new work from twelve international artists in an exploration of love and desire at the beginning of the new millenium. The exhibition explores contemporary ideas of love, anxiety, and ambivalence, calling our attention towards human necessities and desires channelled through the body.The photographs of Eulalia Valldosera and the playful paintings of Sophia Kosmaoglou deal with the complexities and contradictions within human relationships. While Valldosera takes inspiration from everyday situations, Kosmaoglou subverts the male authority of children's fairy tales. It is precisely an experience of a painful relationship that Fred Mann wishes to convey through his text paintings, influenced by the poetry of Apollinaire and e.e. cummings. Since love is not a matter of age, Katarzyna Kozyra reflects on the nature of our emotions and difficulties in their manifestation when we grow older. Her new video installation is as moving as "Men's Bathouse", shown at the 1999 Venice Biennale. Begona del Arco's series of small paintings is a comment on the coming of age that widens the difference between innocence and experience, and how spontaneous expressions of emotions give way to repression among "grown ups". Simon Costin's "Tearpiece" is an unrepressed producer of materialisedemotions. For the duration of the show, Costin's "tear machine" will produce endless tears that will eventually make up a unique pattern. In Charles Kriel's sound piece, a love letter is read out not as a personal memento but as a universal statement about the memories, fantasies and expectations that are commonly associated with love. In Veronika Bromova's "Lovers", a series of photographs on shared moments of intimacy, the private also becomes public. Similarly, in Sharon Kivland's work, desire enters a more visible, semi-public sphere. Veronika Bromova's emphasis is on the limitations of her own body. In an image from "Zemzoo", the installation that she showed at the 1999 Venice Biennale, the artist's body is bound and deformed. The female body is not depicted as a site of self-adoration, but rather of selfexploration. Also experimenting with his on body, Slawomir Belina engages the viewer in a dark game of pleasure and pain. Edwin David's dyptich explores the same path. Consising of a negative and a positive exposure of the same image - featuring a transvestite - it attempts to go beyond the binary logic of male versus female. "Jeux d'Amour" is a touring exhibition - from London to Athens, Barcelona, Prague and Warsaw. A catalogue about the exhibition will be available, with full information on the participating artists, including critical texts. For further information and to order the catalogue please contact |
