Politics of Love

Participating artists: Mounira Al Solh, Francis Alÿs, Isaac Chong Wai, Anna Ehrenstein, Amna Elhassan, FAIRY BOT (Jon Frickey, Thies Mynther, Sandra Trostel), Robert Filliou, Parastou Forouhar, Green Go Home (Rirkrit Tiravanija & Tomas Vu), Johan Grimonprez, Elza Gubanova & Leon Seidel, Shilpa Gupta, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Soyon Jung, Hiwa K, Rebecca Katusiime & Emmanuel Oloya, Tilman Küntzel, Lulu MacDonald, Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya, Sabine Mohr, Dan Peterman, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Wolf Vostell “Love is an ontological condition, an ontological power really in that sense that love changes you. When you love politically you lose yourself and are transformed into something different […]”. Michael Hardt in an interview with Johan Grimonprez, 2014 On the initiative of the French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou (1926–1987), the Art-of-Peace Biennale was launched at the Kunsthaus Hamburg and the Kunstverein in Hamburg in 1985 with a call “for the weaving back together of the three threads of ART, SCIENCE and WISDOM into a new authenticity.” The idea for a concerted art event in the name of peace took shape in 1983/84 while Filliou was teaching at the Hamburg University of the Arts in collaboration with his students and colleagues. Following the premise that peace is a form of art rather than an abstraction, artists from around the world were invited to develop “their indi-vidual contributions to this collective (re)search”: perspectives envisaged by Filliou in the Biennale cata-logue for the joint creation of peace as “an alternative to doom” connected with the horrors of war. Forty years later, however, in a time of increasing global crises, wars, humanitarian strife and ecological ca-tastrophes, we are facing growing national and individual delimitation and isolation. More and more, essen-tial visions for collaborative solutions and coalitions of action are disappearing, from which new concepts for networking and forms of mutual participation might emerge. “We're all against war. But what are we for? Peace, we say. What is peace?” In our transnational situation of mounting conflicts and threats of war, we again raise Filliou's questions. Today, socially engaged “politics of love,” as defined by the political phi-losopher and literary theorist Michael Hardt, are more relevant than ever. Based on “a physics of multiplici-ty” (cf. Hardt’s dOCUMENTA (13) essay “The Procedures of Love”, 2012), this practice of love departs from economically steered assertions of control and power. Love is a driving force of our existence that also affects our collective interactions. Despite its commercial-ization and depletion through the global mechanisms of consumerism, it retains its transformative poten-tial. The international group exhibition Politics of Love casts a focus upon an inclusive, multi-voiced bond-ing that posits a multitudinous “we” in the place of individuated disconnection, bringing about a produc-tive, collective potentiation of difference. The exhibition explores the interplay between proximity and dis-tance, creation and disruption as well as varied forms of intimacy, the common good and multi-perspectival experiential abundance as a basis for togetherness in solidarity and diversity. Works by both emerging and established international artists are juxtaposed in the exhibition with recol-lections of participatory projects that have brought the notion of the commons to life and have put col-laborative processes into practice. An integral strand of the project is the question of the societal per-spectives given by a “politics of love” in the sense of a passion for that which interconnects us in our differ-ences and multiplicities: as a perception-, mind- and heart-expanding dynamic of openness, empathy and affection that brings us together in the multifariousness of our respective particularity and otherness and provides inspiring and sustainable paths into the future.