Artists: Gabriel Abrantes, Hannah Toticki Anbert, Melanie Bonajo, Laura Cemin, Benjamin Crotty, Marijke De Roover, Kyriaki Goni, David Haines, Juliet Jacques, Mahmoud Khaled, Maria Mavropoulou, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Kyle McDonald, Marge Monko, Peter Puklus, Margaret Salmon

Curator: Katerina Gregos

Title: Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies)

Venue: Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn

Photo: Paul Kuimet, Tallinn Art Hall

The exhibition probes the societal patterns and challenges as well as possibilities that the Internet and social media – and now the Covid-19 pandemic – present to our intimate relationships. The exhibition is curated by Katerina Gregos.

Digital technology and consumerism have significantly transformed love and social relationships. The experience of the virtual has increasingly dissolved the boundary between private and public. This influences how we communicate and interact with one another, especially with those closest to us. On the one hand, the Internet and social media have facilitated the expression of non-heteronormative identities, forms of desire, and alternative ways of being. On the other, they have played a problematic role in cultivating pathologies such as narcissism, obsessive self-performativity, digital dependency, and the commodification of emotion. The conflation of reality and fantasy has created complex psychological and relational entanglements, which are explored – among other things – in this exhibition.

As curator Katerina Gregos says: “At a time of increasing alienation, individualism and loneliness – symptoms of our world’s increasingly urbanised, digitally networked lifestyles – the exhibition prompts us to think how we can we reclaim meaningful relationships and unconditional love as a potent emotional force and intense psychological bond between people that gives meaning to our lives in ways that no other interaction, ‘object’ or experience can? How can love be rescued from the claws of capital and the corporate technosphere?”

Modern Love looks into the pathologies and problems afflicting love and matters of the heart today, aiming to prompt a reconsideration of how we engage with those we feel closest to us and asks us to imagine a way out of current feelings of emotional sterility, loneliness and the ‘cold intimacies’ engendered by the digital revolution. 

The exhibition Modern love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) is one of the largest productions of Tallinn Art Hall in recent years, which was produced as a multi-year project in collaboration with Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (Germany).