Exhibition: Karla Hiraldo Voleau – Another Love Story

Opening: 11.05.2023, 7 p.m.
Exhibition: 12.05 – 17.06.2023

French-Dominican artist and photographer Karla Hiraldo Voleau investigates notions of intimacy, love and gender representation, combining (auto-) fictional and non-fictional elements between photographic and written storytelling.

In the series Another Love Story (2022), the artist retraces and rewrites her relationship with a man after his affair with another woman is discovered. A couple hundred smartphone photographs re-stage intimate pictures taken during the time of their one-year relationship.

The printed images are presented in the show on 13 panels, interspersed with the transcript of a disconcerting phone conversation between the artist and « the other woman », who is herself unaware of the man’s double relationship. All portraits from the private memories collection of Hiraldo Voleau’s photo-library were reenacted by the artist herself together with a professional actor, chosen for his resemblance with her then partner. All shots were taken in the same locations as the original pictures. Every panel on show presents images taken in each of the 13 months of the relationship: from the initial closeness and sensuality of the couple, the narrative shifts to their progressive distancing at the end of the series.

Hiraldo Voleau questions the truthfulness of the photographic document by juxtaposing reenacted pictures to original ones, blending fiction and reality. By thematizing personal trauma and its processing, she manages to depict a difficult emotional state by using the medium of photography in a performative way. Her approach is not vindictive. Rather, it offers an intimate insight through her gaze and tells a story of sorority, showing how such painful an experience can become constructive.

Extract from a text by Maximilian Pellizzari
Production by Katharina Kolakowski
Installation shots by Samira Mosca