What’s Love Got to Do with It is an interdisciplinary exhibition built around the stories and works of 25 Belgian and international artist couples. Whereas the eponymous song by Tina Turner presents love as a secondary emotion, the exhibition uses the title as an open question. Rather than equating love with a purely emotional experience, it explores how love can function as a relational and creative practice that nourishes, challenges, or gives direction to artistic processes. By connecting personal experiences with broader societal reflections and placing the human behind the maker at its center, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the role of relationships and love in their own lives and imagination.

 

“It is easier to articulate the pain of love’s absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives.”
— bell hook

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With this observation from the philosophical essay All About Love, bell hooks identifies a cultural sensibility that also resonates in the song What’s Love Got to Do with It by Tina Turner, in which love appears as a secondary emotion and primarily as a source of sorrow and distress. Hooks reads the popularity of this perspective in popular culture as a symptom of a zeitgeist in which the desire for connection coincides with skepticism toward the possibility of love as a transformative practice.

In the context of the exhibition of the same name, What’s Love Got to Do with It, the title is not understood as a denial of the value of love, but as an open research question. The exhibition explores how love functions as a relational and creative force that can nourish, challenge, or shape artistic processes. By linking personal experiences with broader societal reflections, the project focuses on the ways in which relationships leave their traces in artistic practices—and vice versa. Love thus appears not as an abstract ideal or a uniform experience, but as a practice with as many faces as there are artist couples: concrete, lived relationships that shape choices, perspectives, and imagination.

The exhibition brings together a series of thematic tensions that make visible the relationship between love and art: the balance between autonomy and co-creation, the role of gender and care work within creative collaboration, and the influence of loss, parenthood, and everyday life on the artistic process. By approaching these issues through the experiences of artist couples, the focus shifts from the isolated artist toward art as a relational practice. Within What’s Love Got to Do with It, art is not approached as an autonomous production, but as a practice that emerges through encounter and reciprocity.

The project is built around a series of interviews with sixteen artist couples living and working in Belgium. Their testimonies formed the basis for the thematic structure of the exhibition and served as a guiding thread for the selection and presentation of the works. These contemporary practices are brought into dialogue with works by iconic artist couples from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, creating a historical perspective on different kinds of relationships and artistic collaborations.

What’s Love Got to Do with It thus positions itself as both a reflection on and an exploration of the place of love within artistic and everyday life. By making visible the human being behind the maker, the exhibition invites visitors to reflect on the role of relationships and love in their own actions and imagination.

Marie-Maxine Giesken

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