Love Is…
Group Show
23 February - 31 March 2019
curated by Sihle Motsa
An Exhibition at the BKhz Studio
In “Freedom and Love”, Keguro Macharia maps for us the trajectory of state politics and how language used in daily conversation reinforces particular assumptions about a state. Political vernaculars are, according to Macharia:
words, phrases and expressions that announce a conversation about politics: they are vocabularies that assemble something as experienced as the political and gather different groups around something marked as the political... they create possibilities for different ways of coming together- from short lived experiments to long-term institution building- and they also impede how we form ourselves as we-formations, across the past, the present, the future and all the in-between times marked by slow violence and prolonged dying.
He offers freedom and love as political vernaculars.
The show ‘Love is ...’ is premised on the possibilities that may emerge from thinking of love beyond the constricts of romance. An open-ended statement that encourages us to thinking of love as liberatory, as a common language whose use in our daily dealings with one another has the potential to facilitate an understanding that transcends difference.
The exhibition, hosted at the BKhz Studio in Braamfontein, a space that operates as a gallery and studio resonates with this call to re-imagine the frontiers of love through artistic practice. We invited artists to submit works that speak to the politics of love in a globalized world. Works that engage what they make of love and a politics of love that may take the form of self-love, sisterly-solidarity, compassion, activism, as well as any and all iterations that call us to understand and use love to establish cross-cultural and transnational links that facilitate new ways of being.
The show will be a group show featuring the works of mostly black womxn living and working in Africa and the Diaspora. It will open with a conversation on the concept of love and freedom in contemporary art practice facilitated by art practitioners who engage the discursive terrain of love in the arts.