Elien Ronse

Exhibition 'Holding hands from afar', with Lea Rüegg and Hannah O' Flynn, at DOK, hosted by Bebe Books, Ghent (Belgium), 2019

Is love measured by the width of a bed? By an ochre coloured document stamped in shiny ink? By an unspoken contract of possession? By an ice cube that has slipped between one too many lips?

‘Holding hands from afar’ is a reflection on love’s relation to imposed categories and attempts to control it. The exhibition is an investigation into the complexities of liking, passioning and adoring. As our lives swirl around the events, desires and absence of love, it is often forgotten to ask what it really contains. A word that, while being repeated over screechy speakers playing a radio show, slowly starts to become an empty sign.

Love is in the air, while trying to understand complex relations following the ups and downs in the love life of a kettle. Love is in the air, while we are haunted by the ghosts of past partners, dead fathers and future spectators through the phone’s screen. Love is in the air, while it escapes the grips of language in a failed letter on a national visa application form. Love is in the air, while hearts are broken in search for intimacy with Smartphone, age 32.

While love cries through the speakers once again, one starts to wonder why the unspeakable gravity at the centre of life is insistently being categorized. Why trying to make legible that which cannot be given a name, that overwhelms and overflows any frame it is given by its fast fluctuations?