Love is impossible without a meeting. After all it takes two beings to see each other first. Having met once, the lovers long to see each other again and again, more and more often. Thus, having started with the first encounter love grows into a sequence of dates, which Jean Genet called "ceremonial of love". That's the difference between falling in love and being in love. If one encounter is enough for the former, the latter is a connection unfolding in time. Therefore, being a relation of steady and continuous nature, love is inseparable from time. Then we can agree with the political philosopher Michael Hardt: if we consider love a steady and long-term connection between two people, then it really is a social institution. And if the common belief that love is the basic and most intimate human experience is true, then love is the prime cause of social ties and human society.

Works:
Akram Zaatari. "Tomorrow Everything Will Be Allright", 2010 (Single-channel video, colour, mono sound, 11 min. Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London);
Sophie Calle. "Anatoli", 1984 (Photographs, framed photograph, graphite pencil. Courtesy of the Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and Arndt & Partner, Berlin);
Lee Mingwei. "100 Days With Lily", 1995 (Five silver dye bleach prints, 166 х 115 each. Collection of Rudy Tseng);
Boris Mikhailov. "Diary", 1980-2016 (Photo, 30 x 21 each. Courtesy of the artist);
Hans-Peter Feldmann. "Liebe/Love", 2006 (Photo album (found photo), 50 х 62,5 each photo. Courtesy of the artist);
Kateřina Šedá. "It Doesn't Matter", 2008 (Drawings, 50 х 62,5 each. Courtesy of the artist); "Her Mistress's Everything", 2008 (Photographs, 60 х 40 each. Video, 17:05 min. Courtesy of the artist)

We are used to believe that through love we can get close to the inmost base of life. Nevertheless, having become a key subject of culture, love has acquired certain cultural patterns in return. This is a theme of the famous book by Roland Barthes "A Lover's Discourse: Fragments", but long before Barthes Francois de La Rochefoucauld noticed: "Many would have never fallen in love unless they heard of it before". To put it in other words, to some extent love is always a love for love itself, as it's a belonging to a certain tradition of love experience and expression that is valuable as well. Therefore it would be wrong to put love only in the intimate sphere: love is always a representation, it's always a play performed on a scene. Let's not forget it's the chivalric cult of the Belle dame, with its idea of courtly love, that underlies European concept of love, and the true nature of courtly love flourishes mainly in imagination, not in reality. According to Jacques Lacan, courtly love techniques are kept and develop within the idea of the "pleasure to desire", which turns it into a sort of ascetic practice where ethical function of eroticism is maximally expressed. Lacan has also made another important observation: an ability to speak leaves a subject without any chances for direct access to sexual. It is the language that works as an agent between two lovers forcing them to express their affections instead of merely showing them. Therefore, it's not only we control the language to make our love confessions, but language controls us, dictating certain rules and phrases to be used for expression of the feelings.

Works:
Núria Güell. "Ayuda Humanitaria", 2008–2013 (19 Letters. Courtesy of the artist and ADN Gallery, Barcelona);
Eli Cortiñas. "Confessions with an open curtain", 2011 (Single channel video, 5:25 min. Courtesy of the artist, Soy Capitán, Berlin and Waldburger Wouters, Brussels);
Tracey Moffatt. "Love" (Edited by Gary Hillberg), 2003 (Found footage montage on video and DVD, 20:51 min. Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 gallery, Sydney);
Mariateresa Sartori. "In Sol Maggiore/ In Sol Minore", 2013 (Video, 5:48 min. Courtesy of the artist);
Anita Sieff. "Missed II", 1995 (Film, 16 mm, 10 min. Courtesy of the artist);
Andy Warhol. "Kiss", 1963-64 (Film, 54 min. Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.)

A person in love, searching for reciprocity, eagers to explain oneself. He tries to speak about his love as no one else had before as he wants to be utterly touching and convincing. However, as linguistic philosophy insists, by changing our language we change reality and by changing our usual behavior we change whole social structure. Thus love becomes a metaphor and a real force of social renewal. "The Personal is Political," declared American political activists of 1970-s. According to Alain Badiou, love that breaks a routine wherever it comes is always the "moment of truth" offering a chance for a "new way of being". "Sex + sentimentality instead of love," that's how another French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy defined principles dominating in the modern world. There's no space for love in it, since a transformative power of love remains useless when standard values are restricted to money and success, property and power. There's another important thing about "the Personal is Political" slogan: it has a reversal meaning. The transformative power of love does not only affect social status quo, but also its subject. After all love is always an experience that turns a human into a person. As Russian philosopher Viktor Mazin once said: "One needs to be a person to love and one has to love to be a person".

Works:
Bisan Abu-Eisheh. "Love Speech", 2014 (Two-channel video, color, sound, 20:17 min. Courtesy of the artist);
Akram Zaatari. "Twenty-Eight Nights and A Poem I", 2015 (HD video, color, sound, 42:11 min. Courtesy of the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London);
Nikolay Oleynikov. Member of the group "Chto Delat". "In a cold sweat I jumped out of my bed, I dreamed that uprising was no longer possible...", 2016 (Installation (textile, sewing, acrylic), dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist. Artwork is carried out with the help of cooperative "Shvemy" (Anna Tersehkina, Olesya Zamojskaya));
Gabriella Ciancimino. "Furious Love", 2016 (Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and Prometeogallery, Milan);
Fouad Elkoury and Shirin Abu Shaqra. "On War and Love", 2006 (Photo diary (33 photos). Courtesy of Fouad Elkoury);
Anita Sieff. "Hai tempo per me?" ("Have you got time for me?"), 2010 (Neon light, sound installation, 0:15 min. Courtesy of the artist, Renza Brunello, Norbert Salenbauch)