Fucked up lover (installation view)

Curated by Dan Howard-Birt, Modern Love is a show assembled at the suggestion of the hobbypopMUSEUM; to take a collection of London based artists to exhibit in their artist-run museum in Dusseldorf. The offer from the infectiously proactive Dusseldorf-Berlin-London based collaborative fuelled a similarly ambitious response, thus the show took eighteen young artists from London to Germany, returning to London for the second part of Modern Love, and bringing with it, as special guests, hobbypop.

Love fucks you up (installation view)

For Modern Love, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard produced two new pieces of work, Fucked up lover (DVD, black and white, 30 minutes) and Love fucks you up (8 wall based works consisting of large-scale reproductions of inlay cards from compilation cassettes). Both are on-going projects. For the work the artists invited their friends to compile cassettes for their lovers. Each participant was then asked to talk, in front of a video camera, about their tape, the music on it and the person it was made for.

Modern Love invitation card

"Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard allow music to describe romantic relationship, be that actual or aspirational. By composing compilation tapes for one another they seem to give over the responsibility of finding the right words to others who are simply better at it. But this superficial conclusion denies exactly what music is, mainly a space of shared experience and idiosyncratic meaning. So even if we don't know the particular records the titles are luicid enough, and if we do, then even better. " More...

Dan Howard-Birt, Modern Love Exhibition Guide

Fucked up Lover

The artists gathered for Modern Love share a vision of the continuing significance of the romantic. Other artists featured in the show include:

Maria Chen, Sophie Brown, Paul Housley, Alex Morrison, Chris Owen, Matthew Sawyer, Saron Hughes, Luke Gottlier, Matt Calderwood, Leigh Curtis, Emily-Jo Sargent, Max Hymes, Giles Round, Roger Hiorns, Catharina Barich, Peter Harris and Dan Howard-Birt.

Dan Howard Birt

Read Love Letter, Love Letter an essay by Dan Howard-Birt, the curator of Modern Love in Dusseldorf and London about Fucked up lover and Love fucks you up.