HAYWARD GALLERY PROJECT SPACE PRESENTS
WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT
What’s Love Got to Do with It
Hayward Gallery Project Space
Admission Free
23 July – 14 September 2014
Private View 23 July 2014 6.30-8.30pm
To coincide with the Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love (28 June - 31 August 2014), Hayward Gallery
Project Space presents a group exhibition that interrogates the verbal and visual languages of love and
the myriad ways that such ‘gestures’ are mediated through social and cultural codes.
The participating artists Anna Barham, William Cobbing, Sharon Hayes, Joanna Piotrowska and
Ilona Sagar share an interest in exploring the particular emotional and physical choreography of
intimacy and the paradoxical power-shifts that accompany longing and desire.
The works take different approaches to investigating specific constructs of love and how it is influenced
by external forces. Beyond the intimacy between individuals, the exhibition addresses wider concerns
and societal forces which shape our experience of love and intimacy, including the ways in which
politics, popular culture and the built environment affect language and the body.
William Cobbing tackles the possibilities and processes of love through a selection of video works and
a new series of kinetic sculptures using oil-clay. Through scenarios that position a struggle to overcome
obstacles alongside a failure of communication, the desire to ‘blend’, to come together, yet be
empowered and liberated is ultimately rendered unattainable.
The mechanics of romantic speech, and language are appropriated in both a film piece by Ilona Sagar
and in an audio installation by Sharon Hayes. Every lunchtime during a working week in September
2007, Hayes emerged from the corporate headquarters of UBS in midtown Manhattan, to speak to an
anonymous lover. Her addresses, which form the basis of this work, weave comments on and about
personal longing and desire with comments about politics, war and the trauma and dislocation of living
in a moment of war. Sagar’s work also treads a line between lover’s address and political message;
mixing the sensual with bureaucratic jargon. Alluding to the language of love letters and erotic fiction,
both works expose our accustomed use of universal modes of expression to overcome the difficulties of
verbalising individual feelings.
Anna Barham disrupts the emotion of a familiar 1970s disco classic love hit by using dictation software
which which repeatedly interprets and mediates the live voice reading the lyrics out loud. Recalling the
format of 'chinese whispers' or exquisite corpses, the newly 'interpreted' text is in turn read by a
subsequent participant. Each new reading generates its own interpretation, resulting in a series of
misinterpretations which turn the familiar expressions of love into a chain of subtle displacements and
slippages of meaning.
In Joanna Piotrowska’s black-and-white photographs love is shown as a carefully staged and
choreographed physical endeavor. Using bodies to form almost sculptural arrangements, she conveys
a series of disconnected moments of intimacy. Our reading of these portraits is further complicated
when we learn that they are of siblings, parents, and other family members presented in stark contrast
to traditional family portraiture.
Curated by Dominik Czechowski, Rahila Haque and Eimear Martin, What's Love Got to Do with It
seeks to uncover the complex frameworks that surround the way we as individuals and as a society
articulate ‘love’, and to confront its inherently intangible nature and universal significance.
There will be a programme of artist performances and other events to accompany the exhibition; please
see below or visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk for details.
For press information contact:
Nicola Jeffs on nicola.jeffs@southbankcentre.co.uk on 0207 921 0676 or 07730 528 051.
Filipa Mendes on filipa.mendes@southbankcentre.co.uk on 020 7921 0672 or 07531 643279
Notes to Editors:
Listings Information
What’s Love Got to Do with It
Hayward Gallery Project Space
23 July – 14 September 2014
Admission Free
Monday 12 noon – 6pm
Tuesday to Sunday 10am – 6pm
Late nights Thursday and Friday until 8pm
Visitor information: www.southbankcentre.co.uk
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX
Performances and events:
Thursday 24 July, Dan Graham Pavilion, 6.30pm
In-conversation
To mark the publication of her award winning-artist book FROWST, Joanna Piotrowska discusses her
work in the context of the family album with Ben Burbridge, co-editor of Photoworks magazine, and
Lecturer in Art History at University of Sussex.
Saturday 9 August, Hayward Gallery Project Space, 3pm
Performance: Ilona Sagar, I fell backwards and you were there, 2014
A newly commissioned performance exploring bodily movements, gestures and collective actions in
response to the site and design of the Dan Graham Pavilion Waterloo Sunset as well as Simone Forti’s
studies on pedestrian movement
Thursday 14 August, Dan Graham Pavilion, 7pm
Anna Barham, I feel love, 2014
Live Production Reading Group
A live production reading group which takes the lyrics of a 1970s disco hit and transforms them though
repeated reading by the participants of the group and speech to text software.
Thursday 21 August, Dan Graham Pavilion, 7pm
William Cobbing, Palimpsest, 2014
A newly commissioned performance in collaboration with artist Beth Collar presents a disjointed
‘conversation’ between two protagonists scrawled into wet clay.
Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest arts centre, occupying a 21-acre site that sits in the midst of
London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames. The site has an extraordinary
creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain. Southbank Centre is
home to the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and the Hayward Gallery as well
as The Saison Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. For further information please visit
www.southbankcentre.co.uk.
Festival of Love at Southbank Centre
Southbank Centre’s summer 2014 festival is dedicated to the theme of love. Hundreds of artists,
communities and partners will participate in creating a festival that will explore the many different facets
of human love – from romantic love and the breakdown of relationships, to the harmony (or
disharmony) between nations and the concept of memorials. The festival runs from 28 June to 31
August, with a taster weekend from Friday 30 May to Sunday 1 June. Featuring a wide-ranging
programme of themed weekends, performances, talks, outdoor art installations and urban greenery
across the site, one of the highlights, in celebration of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act becoming
law in England and Wales this March, will be the mass wedding event for opposite sex and same-sex
couples on the finale festival weekend.