Love, Maybe – Intimacy and Desire in Contemporary Art

The exhibition Love, Maybe – Intimacy and Desire in Contemporary Art, curated by Dr Jana Johanna Haeckel is dedicated to the possibilities and challenges of depicting love in contemporary art. What ideas and prejudices shape our understanding of love and intimacy? Which images are missing from collective memory, especially with regard to empathic forms of togetherness? Inspired by the eponymous poem by Afro-American writer Audre Lorde, Love, Maybe is dedicated to the possibilities and challenges of depicting love in contemporary art.

The group exhibition shows around 240 photographs, multimedia installations and five large contemporary sculptures using the medium of glass by 24 international artists from 13 different countries. The exhibition is divided into four chapters, whose colourful staging is based on the feeling of closeness and security and which address intimacy, regimes of the gaze, care and queerness. Using a QR code on selected works, visitors are invited to listen to the voices of the artists talking about their work.

For the first time, the exhibition occupies two floors at the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung: Love, Maybe opens the new 200 square metre BlackBox FirstFloor. With the same award-winning lighting design and contemporary, minimalist elegance as the BlackBox on the ground floor, the exhibition space has doubled to 400 square metres, strengthening the foundation’s reputation as a distinctive, international art venue in the north of Munich.

A richly illustrated catalogue (in German and English) accompanies the exhibition. It is published by Distanz-Verlag and features a foreword by Dr Eva-Maria Fahrner-Tutsek, an essay by Dr Jana Johanna Haeckel, a text by journalist and writer Minna Salami and a conversation between the artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya and the curator. There is also the four-part podcast Love, Maybe.

Dr Jana Johanna Haeckel holds a PhD in art history and is an independent curator and author. After Veronika Epple from C/O Berlin, she is the second curator to be supported by the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung as part of its new ‘Young Curators’ funding programme. The programme enables curators to conceive and implement exhibitions, optionally with an accompanying publication.