On the initiative of the French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou, the Art-of-Peace Biennale was launched in 1985 at the Kunsthaus Hamburg and the Kunstverein in Hamburg with a call “for the weaving back together of the three threads of ART, SCIENCE and WISDOM into a new authenticity.” The concept for a concerted art event in the name of peace took shape in 1983/84 while Filliou was teaching at the Hamburg University of the Arts in collaboration with his students and colleagues. Following the premise that peace is a form of art rather than an abstraction, artists were invited from around the world to develop “their individual contributions to this collective (re)search,” as outlined by Filliou in the Biennale catalogue: perspectives for the joint creation of peace as “an alternative to doom” connected with the horrors of war.2

Forty years later, however, in a time of increasing global crises, wars, humanitarian strife, and ecological catastrophes, we are facing growing national and individual delimitation and isolation. More and more, essential forward-looking visions for collaborative approaches to solutions and action alliances are disappearing, from which new concepts for networking and forms of mutual participation might emerge. “We're all against war. But what are we for? Peace, we say. What is peace?”3 In our transnational situation of mounting conflicts and threats of war, we again raise Filliou's questions. Today, socially engaged “politics of love,” as defined by Michael Hardt on the grounds of “a physics of multiplicity,”4 , which reach beyond economically steered assertions of control and power plays are more relevant than ever.

Love is a driving force of our existence that also affects our collective interactions. Despite its commercialization and depletion through the world-spanning mechanisms of consumerism it retains its transformative potential. The international group exhibition Politics of Love casts a focus upon an inclusive, multi-voiced bonding that posits a multitudinous “we” in the place of individuated disconnection and conceives of itself as a productive, collective multiplication and potentiation of difference. The exhibition explores the interplay between proximity and distance, creation and disruption, as well as forms of intimacy, the common good, and multi-perspectival experiential abundance as a basis for togetherness in solidarity and diversity. Works by both emerging and established international artists are juxtaposed in the exhibition with recollections of participatory projects that have brought the notion of the commons to life and have put collective processes into practice. An integral strand of the project is the question of the societal perspectives given by “politics of love” in the sense of a passion for that which interconnects us in our differences and multiplicities: as a perception-, mind-, and heart-expanding dynamic of openness, empathy, and affection that brings us together in the multifariousness of our respective particularity and otherness and provides inspiring and sustainable paths into the future.

Curated by Dr. Belinda Grace Gardner and Anna Nowak

Duration of the exhibition: 30.11.2024–2.2.2025

Participating artists: Mounira Al Solh, Francis Alÿs, Isaac Chong Wai, Anna Ehrenstein, Amna Elhassan, FAIRY BOT (Jon Frickey, Thies Mynther, Sandra Trostel), Robert Filliou, Parastou Forouhar, Green Go Home (Rirkrit Tiravanija & Tomas Vu), Johan Grimonprez, Elza Gubanova & Leon Seidel, Shilpa Gupta, Monilola Olayemi Ilupeju, Soyon Jung, Hiwa K, Rebecca Katusiime & Emmanuel Oloya, Tilman Küntzel, Lulu MacDonald, Nicholas Odhiambo Mboya, Sabine Mohr, Dan Peterman, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Wolf Vostell