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I Know Something About Love

Group show at Parasol unit. 2011
Date: 9 March, 2011 until 22 May, 2011
Curator: Ziba Ardalan
Organiser: Parasol unit

Held at Parasol unit, London, the exhibition, I Know Something About Love featured work by Shirin Neshat, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Yang Fudong. The following extracts come from the exhibition’s press release:

“This exhibition at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art was devoted to works by Yang Fudong, Shirin Neshat, Christodoulos Panayiotou and Yinka Shonibare MBE. Each of these artists explores the theme of love in different times and cultures through the spectrum of their personal experience, observation and commentary. The exhibition title takes its cue from a 1960s song written by Bert Berns and performed by The Exciters, in which there is the recurring lyric, ‘I know something about love’.

Yinka Shonibare MBE re-created the installation ‘Jardin d’amour’ (Garden of Love), which he originally showed in 2007 at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, albeit in a different configuration. In this work Shonibare applies a playfully political perspective to his exploration of the theme of love in the eighteenth-century Rococo period in France.

The Chinese artist, Yang Fudong used the medium of moving image to explore the theme of love in one of his early works, the 3-channel video installation ‘Flutter, Flutter… Jasmine, Jasmine, 2002’. In it, Yang Fudong – known for his critical view on contemporary life in the rapidly changing society in China – looks into the private world of a young Chinese couple.

Shirin Neshat examined the theme of love through the lenses of gender, as probably established and enforced since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. In her two-channel video work, ‘Fervor, 2000’, Iranian artist Neshat seems not only to highlight the frustration and helplessness of Iranian women in this new paradigm, but also to demonstrate how the negative view of love within the revolutionary culture affects natural human feelings.

‘Slow dance marathon, 2005’, by Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou, explored the social construction of love through pop music and the form of slow dancing. In this video documentation of a 24 hour long performance, a human chain is formed by strangers who slow dance to the music of well-known love songs.

This exhibition was curated by Ziba Ardalan and is accompanied by a new publication, co-published and distributed internationally by Koenig Books.”