Life After Love

Life After Love is an exhibition curated by Hera Chan and Edwin Nasr that surveys how the visual grammar of militancy has shifted across the global uprisings of the past decade. Bringing together artists, cultural workers and community organisers, it traces resonances between struggles that have unfolded from Hong Kong to Beirut, and from Yangon to Jenin.

The exhibition asks what the changing forms of political struggle reveal about the changing forms of image-making. If the militant image of the twentieth century emerged alongside mass party politics, anti-colonial liberation movements and the project of revolutionary cinema, what becomes of that tradition within a conjuncture shaped by digital platforms, algorithmic circulation and decentralised forms of political organising?

Life After Love approaches the militant image as a historical category, which has always depended upon particular forms of mediation. Rather than asking whether the militant image survives in the present, Life After Love asks how its political function has been transformed, and what this transformation discloses about the actuality of struggle.

The works assembled reflect upon the conditions through which images are produced, circulated, appropriated and contested. Many emerge from practices situated alongside political organising, mutual aid and community work, where cultural production unfolds in close proximity to lived struggle and the imperative of internationalist solidarity. Taken together, they invite viewers to consider the militant image in the present tense and the forms through which emancipatory futures become thinkable.