With Love in Relief, visual artist Ville Laurinkoski explores the performative gesture through the concept of "backstage" which functions both as a physical frame and an allegorical examination of the social economy in queer culture, where affective labour is often carried out behind the scenes.

Laurinkoski works with a performance score, a kind of script, based on the historically overlooked 1982 novel L’Amour en Relief by gay activist and author Guy Hocquenghem. In his performances, this text serves as a collective and historical backdrop for the present. His performances appropriate and bring to the surface the love, depression, and malaise that characterise the queer lives Hocquenghem depicts, transposing them into the 21st century. He uses his own voice through exaggerated speech, narration, and song, interacting with sound samples to dramatise these experiences to put the process of queer subject formation to the test—not just as a transgression, sublimation, or perversion, but as a work of love.

Laurinkoski transforms the exhibition space into a backstage area that reflects both domestic and institutional contexts. By incorporating domesticated objects such as mattresses on the floor, dance bar rails mounted (far too low) on the walls, sound equipment, posters, and a new exhibition architecture that divides the space, the artist turns the private backstage into an independent artwork and a shared stage for the performances. With Love in Relief, Laurinkoski seeks the liberating capacity that arises from sharing one’s own backstage with the audience, and in the process, transforms loneliness, affection, isolation, rejection, and love into a collective experience. 

The installation functions as a sculptural relief in the physical sense, rethinking the idea of spectacle and dominant visions in Western culture, while testing how love can be understood—not only as an expression of consumption and capitalism’s reality, but as something that provides emotional relief, offering an alternative approach to conventional forms of love. The audience is invited to experience both the space and the affective states in a new, reparative way.

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Show dates:

Love in Relief, 6 March 2025

Love in Relief, 8. March 2025

Love in Relief, 14 March 2025

Doors open at 17:30

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