Another Love Story, Karla Hiraldo Voleau

What remains of a love story once it turns out to have been built on fiction? Photographs that once seemed to confirm intimacy begin to function like evidence in a case file.

Gestures and glances, once private and tender, demand to be read anew. In Another Love Story, Karla Hiraldo Voleau draws on the (familiar to many of us) experience of a relationship breakdown and emotional abuse to craft a subversive and touching story about love, perception, and control over the narrative.

The project was initially conceived as an intimate portrait of a relationship rebuilt after years apart. Everything changed after a phone call from “Her”, the other partner of “X”, the man with whom the artist was in a relationship. The conversation abruptly exposed a year-long deception and triggered a process of revisiting hundreds of private photographs, most of them taken on a mobile phone: spontaneous images of shared trips, everyday life, tenderness and intimacy.

Hiraldo Voleau did not stop at re-examining the archive. She reconstructed it, finding a way to make it public without revealing the identity of the person at its centre. The result is a remarkable project that asks questions on boundaries between reclaiming control over one’s own story and revenge.

The project was originally published as a photobook by the acclaimed Mörel Books and quickly sold out. As an exhibition, it has been presented at venues including the International Center of Photography, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris, Photoforum in Biel, Switzerland, and La Nombreuse in Brussels. The Warsaw presentation of Another Love Story at IFF will become another version of this evolving narrative – another attempt to rearrange a relationship that resisted any single perspective from the very beginning.