A Lovers Discord

A LOVERS DISCORD

Alasdair Duncan, Sharon Kivland, Dominic From Luton, Thomas Vandenberghe, James Unsworth and Alana Lake with others (Linus Bill, Daniel Hoflund, Joseph Maynou, Dan Szor, Ryan Riddington and more) by chance or fate.

A Lover’s Discord is a group exhibition that ponders love’s magnetism, our impulsivity and drives. Taking inspiration from Roland Barthes’s feverish paperback ‘A Lover’s Discourse’, our illusions and delusions about the Other, and others, are further examined, not through words, but through images.

A Lover’s Discord is sensual, visceral and raw - a visual reckoning of the language of love and desire, a drawing together of the symbolic and imaginary, with the real. In this exhibition fragments of images speak where language might otherwise fail us.

'A Lover’s Discourse (Fragments)' is a book that ponders love’s magnetism - that spells our impulsions and delineates our delusions. A Lover’s Discord will visually annotate the sentiment of this literary work with images that conjure similar emotions, exploring the whimsical affect of desire where one never truly sees the Other in others but is caught or captivated by an image.

A Lover’s Discord holds a tension characteristic of the alchemy of emotions felt by the lover, which might be described as a drug so strong that it can push one to the brink of insanity - a place where love is all too often experienced as a symptom of our own compulsivity or impulsivity. Felt not least because beneath its surface, there is no sexual relation in and between people. There is no proper form, no natural fit, divided as we are, as creatures caught in language, against the possibility of natural instinct. Love, the child of that division, being bound up in our relation to the sexual non-relation, can but work as a struggle, caught in the net of its ever failing search for a relation we yearn but cannot attain. Love may be a gambit in deluding ourselves that there is a relation, or love may be that by which we at best fleetingly accommodate solutions, in its improvisations, to the impossibility of a right way.

A Lovers Discord is a touring show, and whilst a small group of artist works will remain constant at the core (or heart), new works and alternate artists will be added to the exhibition with the aim of accentuating the psychoanalytic position that desire is not fixed, but shifting, or fleeting in its fluidity. This will be resounded by the changing works, different spaces and new artists, who we could refer to here, as a partner.

The purpose of this exhibition is to find meaning and content via a subjective visual language that somewhere in the lacuna (indexical gap) the works become singular signs or signifiers bound up in the particular jouissance of each, which offers something which, if it is not of the order of communication, can none the less be got in its relation to love.

A Lover’s Discord is a sign for the real, the unspeakable and possibly un-representable origin of the language of love where we are indelibly caught amidst a fictitious image of ones ideal ego. It is an exhibition of tragedy and heartache lost amidst fantasy and belated disillusionment.

At the Heart

Alana Lake (Curator)

kontorprojects.dk/#!a-lovers-discord/c1q96
MOCA London