Curators: François Cheval and Yasmine Chemali

For its second exhibition, L’amour toujours (Love, Eternally), the Mougins Center of Photography once again celebrates female photography while inviting Natasha Caruana and Jenny Rova. Their works result from personal stories told through familiar experiences.

Photographers are not immune to emotional experience! Whether women or men, all share in the ordeal of romantic relationships with a partner, subjected to the mystery of desire like everyone else. But how do they speak of this today? And are they capable of finding an original form linked to the medium of photography to describe the indescribable?
Historically, excluding portraits of the beloved being, the object of desire or the muse, narratives of coupledom and the complexity of private life are recent. And quite often, they are produced by women photographers seeking to inscribe their work in the general movement of ideas prevailing since the 1970s.

Jenny Rova and Natasha Caruana, clear-sighted, have no particular difficulty in conveying the question of romantic commerce. They are attempting a new iconographic approach to this human invariant, the basis of everything. Their works are essentially reflection turned action on the senses, the sexual body and relationships between the sexes.
For Jenny, the main character in her photo series, romantic passion dominates above all, and for this reason, the consequences of a burning flame must be accepted. Natasha, meanwhile, defines her position through an interrogation of the male gaze. She plays, to some extent, with what animates male desire. We are led into universes in which fiction and autobiography mingle.

Jenny Rova (b. Sweden, 1972) turns her private life into elements for display. The four series of what will be her first solo show in France reveal her singular work.
Originally, this Swedish photographer worked in documentary photography. After finishing up her studies of the medium in Prague, Rova moved to Zurich, where she developed a radical and joyful take on romantic relationships. Separated from, but still in touch with her former partner, she began following him on social networks, discovering her ex-love’s new world, from which she was now excluded. What sort of work could she undertake on the emotions she was drowning in? How could she portray this situation whose very existence was but a mere media mirror? Rova invented a diary, a triangular drama, the existence of which she alone was aware.

Series:

Natasha Caruana (b. UK, 1983) is no longer an unknown in France. Winner of the BMW Artist in Residence Award in 2014, she has nevertheless not gotten the exposure that she deserves. For fifteen years, the British artist has been fictionally creating scenarios that recount personal relationships, the complexity of positions in a heterosexual couple. With typically British wit, Caruana structures photographic encounters using documentation and staging.
From the first series, The Other Woman, we are confronted with the secret lives of married women in extra-conjugal romantic relationships. This series introduced an original tone that subsequently developed withMarried Man – – less an interrogation of the couple than of the ongoing miracle of how it lasts, its fragility and vulnerability to temptation. All of the series hold something of a perfect illustration of the power of desire, its tiny daily perversions and untold secrets – all of which constitutes the work’s originality, never passing judgement but confronting us with the complexity of the couple as an institution. While the theme may be stinging at times (Curtain of Broken Dreams), the illusion that anything is possible still lingers in spite of everything (At First Sight) .

Series: