Love Exposure
Yasmine Louali

“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” (1 Corinthians 13)

Love Exposure takes as its starting point the First Epistle to the Corinthians, where love appears as a promise of revelation, a mode of knowledge and a condition of existence. By transposing it into a contemporary context, Yasmine Louali reveals the irreconcilability between this framework and the logic of techno-capitalism, where the construction of identities and strategies for survival encounter this impossibility.

In her works, acts of love coexist with injunctions to performance and self-discipline. Love in a capitalist context is an ambivalent matrix – both a protective space and a disciplinary device, an architecture within which hierarchies and relations of obedience are constructed, particularly through linguistic structures. Affirmations, slogans, and mantras function simultaneously as gestures of protection, attempts of emancipation and technologies of control. The vocabulary of manifesting reveals this ambiguity: on a collective scale, a promise of political agency in the face of authority; on the intimate level, a requirement for self-surveillance. Through the intertwining of affects and power relations, Love Exposure explores how, in defiance of the logic of control, selfless love emerges as an ascetic practice and a form of resistance.

Curated by Mathilde Badie