Modern Love

The National Museum of Contemporary Art presents the exhibition entitled “Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies)” from 15 December 2022 to 5 November 2023.


Modern Love (or Love in the Age of Cold Intimacies) is the next major group exhibition at NMCA (EMST). Curated by artistic director Katerina Gregos, it launches the museum’s winter-spring exhibition cycle, which focuses on digital technology and its influence on intimate human relationships. The subtitle of the exhibition is a reference to Eva Illouz’s book, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, which argues that these relationships have become increasingly defined by economic and political models of bargaining, exchange, and equity. The exhibition explores the state of love and human bonds in the age of the Internet, social media, and high capitalism, probing how the digital sphere, the impact of technology giants, and neo-liberal practices have transformed love, social relations, and the way we interact with one another. The accessibility of the Internet to an ever-greater number of people has had liberating effects, encouraging and empowering more open and diverse lifestyles, contributing to the dissolution of interpersonal orthodox conventions and social constrictions, and crumbling taboos and biases around gender and sexuality. The exhibition investigates the pathologies and problems afflicting love and matters of the heart and attempts to imagine a way out of our current alienation, emotional sterility, and loneliness. A public programme with performances, talks, and screenings will kick off in the new year in collaboration with IMPAKT Media Organisation in the Netherlands. The opening of the exhibition will be followed in January 2023 by the launch of a series of solo exhibitions that focus on the impact on social relations and contemporary life of digital technology, the Internet, social media, and the economies they produce.

Opening: 15.12.2022, 18.30 until late. At 21.00, performance by Marijke De Roover "Live, Laugh, Limerence (An opera buffa in four acts)". Marijke De Roover’s operatic performance looks into how we choreograph and culturally organise the performance of love through heteronormative structures whilst luxuriating in every cliché of rom coms, musical theatre, opera, karaoke and Hollywood. Duration: 30’