What's Love Got To Do With It?

To coincide with the Southbank Centre’s Festival of Love (28 June - 31 August 2014), Hayward Gallery Project Space presents a group exhibition that interrogates the verbal and visual languages of love and the myriad ways that such ‘gestures’ are mediated through social and cultural codes.

The participating artists Anna Barham, William Cobbing, Sharon Hayes, Joanna Piotrowska and Ilona Sagar share an interest in exploring the particular emotional and physical choreography of intimacy and the paradoxical power-shifts that accompany longing and desire.

William Cobbing tackles the possibilities and processes of love through a selection of video works and a new series of kinetic sculptures using oil-clay.

The mechanics of romantic speech, and language are appropriated in both a film piece by Ilona Sagar and in an audio installation by Sharon Hayes.

Anna Barham disrupts the emotion of a familiar 1970s disco classic love song/hit by using dictation software which which repeatedly interprets and mediates the live voice reading the lyrics out loud.