Voices for Love

PRIOR ART SPACE Presents ‘Voices for love’, a group exhibition featuring artists from a wide range of artistic practices and backgrounds, representatives of the focus of our artistic and curatorial aim: to give the voices to underrepresented artists and their many ways of expression.This presentation stands as the second exhibition of our new Barcelona space and will showcase works from new exhibiting artists alongside with works from the Cuperior and Del Arco Collections. The exhibition will prospect the concept of love and its richness, love understood as a global language for revolutionary change, a path towards inclusivity and understanding.“Voices for Love”, the highest declaration of freedom and the most legitimate form of expression. Love, an intangible concept that embodies the purest emotional intensity that can be experienced by humanity. In this way, artists in this exhibition seek to portray these voices, the ones that speak for acceptance, tolerance, and diversity and express the depth and nuances of human relationships.

In Wynnie Mynerva’s work we see the topic of the “death of romantic love” represented. The concept is origi-nated from a series of stories of close friends of the artist who, on a recurring basis, share heart-breaking love experiences. What we see in the work is the representation of a woman who embraces love, but ends up fleeing from it, murdering it. In other words, it is nothing more than a declaration of the importance of self-love in relationships, a state of appreciation that grows from actions that support our physical, psychological, and spiritual growth.Despite the apparent brightness of the figure in Jin Hee Kim’s Following the Shadow, we recognize the empti-ness of the shadow theatre-inspired silhouettes, representing the lingering reminder of a loved one, regard-less of their physical presence.By the other hand, Sam King’s practice explores diverse issues including subjective experience and human relationships in the digital age, transhumanism, and the utopian and dystopian potentialities of technological progress. Two’s a Crowd depicts two figures, seemingly merging into one another. A metaphor for love, a blurring of boundaries? Yet on second glance, it appears to not be two figures, but one, duplicated, mirrored. In the age of social media, we are obsessed, creating idealized versions of ourselves so that we can be ideali-zed, loved by others. We all want to be loved.Continuing with Sam’s practice, in Perfect Pleasure, we can appreciate the representation of a kiss, an orga-nic and human exchange of emotions. However, the figures seem synthetic, stripped of their corporeality. The work questions how sensuality and touch interrelate within increasingly digitized relationships.

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Otherwise, in Under Moonlight, Sam applies the art historical motif of the almost touching hand - drawn from Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam”, to question the duality of contemporary existence. We desire human touch, yet in the absence of it, we transmit our thoughts and emotions through increasingly digital interac-tions, which resultantly, become, ‘alive’. Thus, the work of Sam King is nothing more than a revindication of the importance of human contact, as well as the need to be accepted and loved.In This is not yoga on the beach I and This is not yoga on the beach II by Mathew Eguavoen, both titles seem to provide additional information to the initial perception of the figures, which despite appearing to be in a relaxed position of yoga in an idyllic landscape, it is not until you have approached the couple that you identi-fy the gesture on their faces and the depth of their emotions. In the artist’s own words:“What the work actually shows is a reflection on the event of slavery and how Africans were paired up along the beach shores in the west of the continent to be sold into slavery. At present, they continue to find them-selves on the same western shores to flee Africa in search of ‘greener pastures’. This reflection makes us reconsider the reasons why this preconception of Africa as a continent from which its own people must flee has been created. Conception created from the Western point of view and transmitted to a large number of Africans, that beyond doing something to change the status quo based on the knowledge acquired, we continue to perpetuate that preconception.“The work seems to allude to the complexity of the socio-political situation in Nigeria, his country of origin; a reflection between love and self-criticism towards his own country.In her work, Kim Booker, plays with the abstraction of a series of bodies emerging in a sea of emotions. These representations evoke the repeated negotiations between the drawn image and its absence, which is charac-teristic of her body of work.Ayogu Kinglsley chooses to portray two icons of fashion and music culture, whom he admires and intends to pay tribute to: Virgil Abloh and Kayne West. Being conscious of the influence and viralization of images in the media, he uses her work to vindicate great personalities of African American origin, placing them in positions and contexts of power.In Friendly Visit by Olamide Ogunagu, it’s predominated by the presence of bubbles, a factor in the artist’s recognition, with the calendar as a metaphor for the fleetingness of time. In the background, we can see a painting representing two intertwined figures of imperceptible identity, while on the shelf we can see the presence of a book whose title contains the word “love”, as if it were a subliminal message about the content of the picture. On the other hand, the leading couple of the painting poses in a relaxed, albeit distant, attitude while they stare at the viewer, questioning it and it part of the same narration of the work.