Exhibit Re-examines "Love"

[Artists Unite]

Unconventional Love at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University

27 April–11 June 2011 

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University offers an unconventional exploration of love in an exhibition titled Common Love, Aesthetics of Becoming. Rather than conceptualize love as a romantic gesture, Common Love resituates love within contemporary sociopolitical discourse. The works included in Common Love explore love as a way to participate in the production of a contemporary world where physical, cultural, and virtual space is shared. Shed of its conventional packaging, the transformative power of love can be identified in the work of the fifteen artists included. 

Common Love draws its inspiration from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's 2009 book Commonwealth. In this work, the authors propose that the common infuses all spheres of life. They refer not only to earth's air, water, plant and animal life, but also to the factors that make up human society: from languages and habits, to affects and codes. Despite living in an ever more globalized world, shared resources are increasingly privatized. Hardt and Negri offer love as a prospective cure, positing love as an act that produces the common in the service of shared knowledge, experience, and new forms of community. In turn, Common Love offers an aesthetic experience of this production.

The exhibition, on view 27 April–11 June, comprises paintings, photographs, sculpture, video, and site-specific installations by 15 artists: Dave Arnold , Ronnie Bass, Guy Ben-Ner, Sean Dack, N. Dash, Marc Handelman, Tim Hyde, Will Kwan, Mads Lynnerup, Yasue Maetake, Gabriel Martinez, Gedi Sibony, Mika Tajima, Christian de Vietri, and Rona Yefman.  Alexander Benenson, Kristen Chappa, Donald Johnson-Montenegro, and Tomoko Kanamitsu serve as curators.