Karla Hiraldo Voleau – Another Love Story

"A year. That’s how long it’s been since Karla Hiraldo Voleau’s exhibition Another Love Story first opened at the MEP in Paris in 2022. A year is also the timeframe of the story chronicled in that project – a love story personal to KHV, which shifts abruptly from its climax to its end when she discovers that X, her lover, is leading a double life – a revelation that prompts the artist to question her certainties.

If reality is a lie, perhaps fiction is the remedy. KHV reappropriates her story by re-enacting it, highlighting the mechanisms behind the making of a couple. Each costume, location and image composition exists from meticulous planning from the artist, referring to call sheets and buying clothing duplicates from stores. Her work combines photography, performance and writing, and blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, between the individual and the collective. Through this performance, KHV asserts herself as a subject and reclaims the power of her own history."

Karla Hiraldo Voleau’s artistic work focuses on intimacy as a critical space. Gender, sexuality, emotions and the body are all subjects she tackles in her photographs in order to reveal what is played out beyond appearances. The artist stages herself in her artistic projects, thereby blending autobiographical narratives and fictions. KHV reflects on the photographic medium as a fictional tool and devises a mise en scène of the feeling of love, thus showing the way we reproduce the norms and social evaluations that are supposed to define a couple, often unconsciously.

Text by Nathalie Herschdorfer, Director of Photo Elysée