Love Stories

Les Photaumnales

October 8, 2016 – December 31, 2016

Curators: Paul Ardenne, Barbara Polla

 

This 2016 edition of the Photaumnales, placed under the sign of love, desires to be generous. Just as love feeds and thrills us, the loves related in “Love Stories” nourish and enliven us. Here, photography is the index of multiple amorous events, of multifarious amours. As you might expect: after all, love—the archer—is blind.

“Love Stories” ventures into a realm of love without borders—with uncalculating openness. Because we no longer need to distinguish between forms of love; we no longer need to assign love a quality, to inscribe it in hierarchies like the ones bequeathed by idealism tainted with moralist propaganda, which casts down carnal love and raises up agape, the love we lavish on the divine. Instead, our guiding principle will be the amorous mechanism, the principle of attraction, the flux that engenders attachment, instilled by nature in all its creatures, conscious or not. Bodies (like the atoms of which they are constituted) live by movement, between the mechanism of necessity and the activation of sensorial flows. This sometimes-unifying movement is what we mean by “love”, to simplify what is a complex reality. What matters here is instinct, drive, feeling—not what draws the drive, not the object of the feeling. Love is a sensation first, becoming a concept only afterwards.

 

With:

 

Janet Biggs, Morgane Callegari, Enna Chaton, Mat Collishaw, Iris Crey, Alix Delmas, Aurélie Dubois, mounir fatmi, Shaun Gladwell, Lauren Fleishman, Dana Hoey, Sandra Hoyn, Ali Kazma, Adriana Lestido, Tuomo Manninen, Robert Montgomery, Gianni Motti, Mads Nissen, Anders Petersen, Pierre et Gilles, Gérard Rancinan, Kiah Reading and Pamela Arce, Olivier Rebufa, Rebecca Russo and Georges H. Rabbath, Andres Serrano, Tejal Shah, Malick Sidibé, Mathilde Troussard, Joel-Peter Witkin.

 

Paul Ardenne and Barbara Polla, October 2016