Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman curated by Benedikt Wyss
„After Love“

Benedikt Wyss (b. 1984) is a freelance curator from Basel, known for his interdisciplinary and dynamic practices. Wyss studied sports science, history, African studies, teacher education, art history, and curating in Basel and Berlin. His exhibitions and happenings are often conceived as serial formats and take place in unconventional spaces. He initiated projects such as the Draisine Derby on railway tracks, the Lago Mio artist residency, and the AR app Primo Print in Motion. Wyss regularly curates projects at Theater Basel. Since 2020, he functions as Co-Director at Kunstverein SALTS in Basel.

After Love

What becomes of love when it changes its form?

A relationship ends without everything that emerged from it disappearing. Things remain, rooms carry memories, and relationships continue to shape the present – in ways that cannot be assigned clearly to either the past or the future. After Love brings together two artistic perspectives on what happens when love changes its form.

The title remains deliberately open. After Love describes what follows love, but equally a movement beyond it, alongside it, or in relation to it. One could use the term post-love for this. But post-love suggests a concept, a theoretical category that looks at love from a distance and describes a state after it. This is not the position I want to take. The post itself also suggests an overcoming, perhaps even the end of what came before. That is precisely not what this is about. After Love does not ask what takes the place of love, but what love can become when it changes its form – and how it remains present in that changed form.

As Ariana Reines writes in her text for the curated by festival, referring to a poem by James Schuyler: «It isn’t obviously about love, but it is palpably made of  love.» This is where After Love begins. The artists do not approach love as a subject to be examined. They are themselves part of situations shaped by love, its past, and its present forms. I did not want to bring together artists who engage with love as a subject, but works in which this situation itself is part of the artistic proposition. They do not represent or explain love. They allow it to become active in things, actions, relationships, and encounters.

The Museum of Broken Relationships, originally conceived by Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić as a one-time art project following the end of their own relationship, collects personal objects that people have kept after a breakup. Each object is accompanied by an anonymously told story. What is initially private and personal becomes part of a growing archive: a collection of things in which stories of love, loss, memory, and separation overlap. With permanent locations in Zagreb and Chiang Mai and numerous exhibitions around the world, the museum has become a place where individual experiences are transformed into a shared cultural history.

The museum looks at what relationships leave behind. Yet the objects it collects are not simply relics of the past. Once they enter the museum, they enter a new context and acquire a new presence. Their stories are no longer only about what happened. They become part of what happens now. They inhabit a space in which private experiences can be shared, remembered, imagined, and read anew. An object that was once part of a relationship does not thereby become evidence of its end. It remains the bearer of a story, while becoming a starting point for new encounters.

Nanna Kaiser and R. Sebastian Schachinger approach the changing form of love from another direction. The two artists were once a couple and are working together in this constellation for the first time for After Love. Their installation takes its starting point in their personal lives and moves playfully between fiction and reality. Kaiser and Schachinger embody a couple expecting their first child and together set up the future nursery. Objects are borrowed from friends and family, taken from existing collections, altered, softened, raised, and given new functions. What begins as a game gradually becomes a real situation: a room takes shape, things are gathered, relationships are activated.

The room does not represent a failed future. Nor does it reconstruct a past relationship. It moves speculatively between what is and what might have been, while existing very concretely in the present – between two people who are no longer a couple and yet continue to share intimate aspects of their lives and imagine a future together. The things in this room are not props in a story. They are part of an action that is taking place now. They are borrowed, altered, and arranged. The room is real, and so is what happens in its making.

This is where the two works meet. The Museum of Broken Relationships takes objects whose original relationships have changed and gives them a new function. Kaiser and Schachinger take a relationship that has changed and play with it. At first glance, the museum belongs to the past, the nursery to the future. But this temporal order remains on the surface. The museum brings what has been left behind into the present; the nursery allows a future once set in motion to emerge in the present. What seemed to belong to the past becomes present; what was imaginable takes shape.

In both works, time is not simply remembered or imagined, but becomes present through things, spaces, and relationships. Love appears here neither as a completed story nor as an abstract idea. Its presence becomes tangible: in things that are kept, in stories that are retold, in relationships that change, and in actions that emerge from them.

I do not read “after” primarily as what comes next. What interests me instead is the continuity of a love that changes its form while remaining present. There is no clear before and after, but forms that flow into one another, change, and continue to have an effect. The past can be remembered, the future imagined – but love happens now: in the things we keep, in the stories we tell, in the spaces we create, and in the games we play.

After Love is not about the end of love. It asks what love can become.

Benedikt Wyss