Love, Maybe – Intimacy and Desire in Contemporary Art
Group show featuring Talia Chetrit

The exhibition Love, Maybe – Intimacy and Desire in Contemporary Art, curated by Dr Jana Johanna Haeckel, is dedicated to the possibilities and challenges of depicting love in contemporary art. What ideas and prejudices shape our understanding of love and intimacy? Which images are missing from collective memory, especially with regard to empathic forms of togetherness? Inspired by the eponymous poem by Afro-American writer Audre Lorde, Love, Maybe is dedicated to the possibilities and challenges of depicting love in contemporary art.

The group exhibition shows around 240 photographs, multimedia installations and five large contemporary sculptures using the medium of glass by 24 international artists from 13 different countries. The exhibition is divided into four chapters, whose colourful staging is based on the feeling of closeness and security and which address intimacy, regimes of the gaze, care and queerness. Using a QR code on selected works, visitors are invited to listen to the voices of the artists talking about their work.

For the first time, the exhibition occupies two floors at the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung: Love, Maybe opens the new 200 square metre BlackBox FirstFloor. With the same award-winning lighting design and contemporary, minimalist elegance as the BlackBox on the ground floor, the exhibition space has doubled to 400 square metres, strengthening the foundation’s reputation as a distinctive, international art venue in the north of Munich.

A richly illustrated catalogue (in German and English) accompanies the exhibition. It is published by Distanz-Verlag and features a foreword by Dr Eva-Maria Fahrner-Tutsek, an essay by Dr Jana Johanna Haeckel, a text by journalist and writer Minna Salami and a conversation between the artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya and the curator. There is also the four-part podcast Love, Maybe.

Dr Jana Johanna Haeckel holds a PhD in art history and is an independent curator and author. After Veronika Epple from C/O Berlin, she is the second curator to be supported by the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung as part of its new ‘Young Curators’ funding programme. The programme enables curators to conceive and implement exhibitions, optionally with an accompanying publication.

In her curatorial and academic work Jana Johanna Haeckel examines image and body politics in contemporary art. She has curated numerous international exhibitions and published books, including Photography Today. Resistant Faces (Pinakothek der Moderne, 2020), Everything Passes Except the Past (Sternberg Press, 2021) and the annual programme Seeing through Clouds (Photoforum Pasquart, 2022-23). She currently teaches as a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (KASK, Belgium). She lives in Brussels.