 © Miyoko IHARA
© JH ENGSTRÖM
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"If I begin with Love, it is because Love is for
everyone—and they will deny it in vain—the greatest
thing in life!"
Charles Baudelaire, "A selection of consoling maxims upon love".
“Experiencing love - what is it? – how do you say it? – how do you paint it? – how do you represent it? Between the cliché of love with its stereotype images of fluffy pink candy or vivid red passion, and all the other various amorous clichés, there’s a whole jumble of ideas rather like our own lives and personal histories, foreign to everyone except ourselves . What aspects of love do we all share?
The hypothesis at BIP2012 is that we share forms and figures. Short of sharing love itself, it is the image of love which moves us, jolts our memory and inspires us with its warmth as well as causing us grief and pain.
Here, images of love, moving, perplexing, captured in the endless flow of looks and bodies, are what the artist has done, one day, to focus the eye, onto this strange attraction of one person for another, whether by looking straight at it or casting sidelong glances towards it. These looks or glances, taken as a day-to-day occurrence, are found, reworked, invented, placed in a particular setting; they give shape to this agitation, this enthusiasm, this intoxication, this rapture, this melancholy, this abandon, this search ... The struggle against disappearance. Love of the image to keep an image of love, before…” (Anne-Françoise Lesuisse)
The Exhibition bearing the name of BIP2012 will be held in the MAMAC/CDE. It will bring together the work of nearly forty artists not only at ground floor level but also in the basement , which has been cleared of the pictures in the collection and completely dedicated to videos. For the first time, visitors will thus be able to discover the cellars of the MAMAC converted for BIP2012 into a exhibition area – a unique opportunity to discover this usually inaccessible space, before the Museum closes for renovation work to be carried out.
This double area, covering an area of more than 2,500 m2 , will feature, among others, Nan Goldin (US) who will present, for the first time in Belgium, her major work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, a slide show of over 800 images set to music by the artist.
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