And since my love is spent (an image-repertoire)

2025.1.10 – 2025.2.28

“Antenna-tenna” is honored to announce the exhibition “And since my love is spent (an image-repertoire)” by curator Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, featuring artists Lotus L. Kang, Maren Karlson, Sam Lipp, Pan Daijing, and Kai Wasikowski.

Duration: 2025.1.10 – 2025.2.28

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Press Release

words by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung

In A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977), Roland Barthes frames the experience of romantic love as a script. This script—informed by and constructed through the literary texts that one consumes—manifests as a series of images that govern how an amorous subject makes “real” their experience of infatuation. In love, Barthes argues, these images exist in sharp relief: the beguiled can recall, with fullness and precision, the physical and auratic details of their beloved. As love fades, however, these defined images lose their shimmer, becoming abstractions with a granulated texture, gradually disappearing into a void. Wrote Barthes: “Is the abyss no more than an expedient annihilation?” ¹The script of images that erupts from within the amorous subject forms what Barthes terms the “image-repertoire”—the unilateral language of love—where a beloved exists as the other’s idealization, unable to speak back to the images which constitute their construction. Of himself as the amorous subject, Barthes writes: “Born of literature, able to speak only with the help of its worn codes, [I] am alone with my strength, doomed to my own philosophy.”²

The Apparition (1633) is a poem written by the metaphysical poet John Donne. In it, the speaker is a scorned man who vows to haunt the woman whose rejection has the effect of ‘killing’ him. This woman, armed with her unwillingness to sate her harasser, is charged by him as a ‘murderer’—an old cliché of Renaissance poetry. Here, the male speaker (though not yet killed) becomes a specter to exact revenge: His haunting will cause the woman to know no peace in sleep; her body “Bath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat”; her face more ghostly than his own. He seeks to imprison her within his own torment. The poem concludes with the exhausted and ‘love-spent’ speaker making one final plea for her to yield, so that she might shed her designation as a ‘murderer’ and maintain innocence: “… and since my love is spent / I’had rather thou shouldst painfully repent, / Than by my threat’nings rest still innocent.” These lines are striking not so much for their reiteration of the speaker’s androcentric threat, but that they perhaps denote the point at which he recognizes his image-repertoire as being in the process of transformation. In other words, a reader might question his libidinal shift from love (albeit “spent”) to vengeance and back to love, asking, how might this script of images ricochet or never resolve?

This exhibition functions as an imaginative exercise with two, interrelated points of entry. Firstly, it attempts to construct and spatialize the affective intensity of the image-repertoire that Donne’s speaker in The Apparition experiences. While the works in this exhibition form an image-repertoire that hopes to echo the visceral force of Donne’s 17th century speaker, it departs from his androcentrism to draw a larger poetic and thematic arc that captures the points at which love shifts to vengeance within the context of material history. Secondly, in his earlier essay “Leaving the Movie Theater” (1975), Barthes suggests that an understanding of a society’s image-repertoire is also an understanding of the subject positions that can manifest within that society.³ If this exhibition represents the image-repertoire of a modern, vengeful subject, to what ideological stakes are they loyal? Put differently, this exhibition asks: What can the experience of falling out of love and into vengeance tell us about one’s material investment in the world?

1. Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978), 12.

2. Ibid, 23.

3. Roland Barthes, “Leaving the Movie Theater” in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).

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About the Curator

Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung is a writer, cultural worker, and founding editor of Decolonial Hacker. He is particularly interested in anarchist and dissident publication practices, utopian thresholds in language, and literary expressions of the revolutionary consciousness. In 2023, Eugene was the Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery, London, where he curated the exhibition Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess. Eugene has been a curator-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, and was previously part of the curatorial and public program teams at the Julia Stoschek Foundation and documenta fifteen, respectively. His writing has appeared in places such as e-flux Criticism, Third Text, ArtReview, Griffith Review, Art+Australia, and more. In 2021, he won the International Award for Art Criticism (IAAC). Eugene currently teaches critical theory and curatorial practice at Design Academy Eindhoven.

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About the Artists

Lotus L. Kang (b. 1985, Toronto; lives and works in Brooklyn) received an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson (2015) and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal (2008). Solo exhibitions include 52 Walker, New York (forthcoming); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2023); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2023); Chisenhale Gallery, London (2023); and Franz Kaka, Toronto (2020). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Julia Stoschek Foundation, Berlin (2024); Kunstverein Munich (2024); James Cohan, New York (2024); Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto (2024); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2024); Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale on Hudson (2023); Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2023); New Museum, New York (2021); and SculptureCenter, Queens (2020). Kang is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2024). Kang has participated in residencies at Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought, New Orleans (2023); Triangle Arts Association, New York (2022); Horizon Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2022); Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Alberta (2020); and Rupert Residency, Vilnius (2018). Kang’s work is in the collections of Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Cc Foundation, Shanghai; Kadist Art Foundation; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Rivoli Due Fondazione per l’Arte Contemporanea, Milan; and Wrocław Contemporary Museum.

Maren Karlson (1988, Rostock, Germany) lives and works in Los Angeles. Karlson’s work uses the speculative technology of painting to examine inconsistencies found within systems of control. Recent solo exhibitions include: Hannah Hoffman, Los Angeles; Soft Opening, London; Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich; and Ashley, Berlin. Her work was included in group shows at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Soft Opening at CFA, Milan; Gathering, London; In Lieu, Los Angeles; Mai 36 Galerie, Zürich; Galeria Municipal do Porto; Soft Opening, London; The Drawing Center, New York; Chapter, New York; and stadium, Berlin.

Sam Lipp (b. 1989) lives and works in New York. Sam Lipp’s work explores the intersection of images and power, particularly representations of the body in relationship to systems of control. In paintings and drawings on steel, Lipp utilizes proprietary and idiosyncratic techniques of paint application and mark making, emulating systematic procedures of mechanized image reproduction—pixelation, xerographics—as well as the material traces such production entails—degradation, deconstruction. Lipp often employs a personally developed method where steel wool is used as a paintbrush to create pin-sized dots of impasto oil paint, applied in successive layers to create hyper-pointillist images. Other works use pencil directly on stainless steel, creating an interplay of refracted light between the surface of the steel and the sheen of the graphite.His works have been featured in art museums and institutions including: Conditions, Toronto, Canada (2024); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Derosia, New York, NY (2022); Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2019) among others.

Pan Daijing(b. Guiyang, China 1991) is an artist and composer whose artistic practice is located at the interface between visual art and music. She crafts immersive explorations into the temporalities of recollection and existence, manifesting as live experiences that evolve in the form of living environments, durational performances, and other modes communal gathering. Her moving image works, site-responsive installations, experimental electronic scores, and sculptures seek to make architectures “speak.” Oftentimes realised as architectural interventions, her practice challenges the boundaries between the animate and inanimate, emphasising, to her audiences, the sonic and affective frequencies of spaces that exist before immediate perception. Pan has held solo exhibitions at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2024); Grazer Kunstverein,Graz (2023); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2021); and Tate Modern, London (2019). Her works have also been shown at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2024); the 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023); Louvre, Paris (2023); and the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2021), amongst others. In 2024 she was awarded the National Gallery Prize in Germany and is shortlisted for the Sigg Art Prize 2025. In January 2025 she will open a solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.

Kai Wasikowski (b. 1992) currently lives and works on Gadigal Land / Sydney, Australia. His practice encompasses photography, video and sculpture. Wasikowski’s projects use photography to question western visual/political systems of knowledge, and aim to spark feelings of curiosity and connectedness towards the powerful lives of images. His works have been featured in art museums and institutions including: Murray Art Museum, Albury, NSW (2024); Microscope Gallery, New York, USA (2023); Gelman Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design, Rhode Island (2023); Stepping Into Tomorrow Gallery, Sydney (2021) among others. Kai is previously artist in residence at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing + Xiamen (2019); Square One Studios in Sydney (2017).

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Antenna-Tenna

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