Nice to meet you, they whispered lovingly is a performance-based work that examines love as a learned and inherited pattern, one shaped through education, social conditioning, and personal history. The work questions how these patterns are repeated across relationships and asks what happens when they become distorted, deviant, or even pathological. By confronting the reproduction of behavioural schemas rooted in instinct and primal responses, Performing Love reflects on the difficulty of breaking cycles that are emotionally ingrained.
The performance raises critical questions: How can one unlearn inherited modes of loving? How does one cope with behaviours that persist despite conscious resistance? And how can the self remain intact when love operates as a contract arbitrated by one’s past experiences? Through embodied action, the work frames love as both a desire and a struggle, often manifesting as repeated, desperate calls for connection.
Performing Love was developed in collaboration with Gilivanka Kedzior and presented as part of LOVE Foundation at the National Museum of Contemporary Art – KIASMA in Helsinki, Finland. The project was curated by Pärttyli Rinne and Pirje Mykkänen, with documentation by Soko Hwang.
