"With her solo show The Love Hotel, Elen Braga refers to the oldest rendezvous hotel in Brussels around the corner from Wouters Gallery, but also to the way in which we experience love and our family life at a time when the world is on fire. “A tapestry depicts the world outside, where police, war and chaos flourish. The conversation on a blanket, about our dreams about war for example or a dinner with an emoji, makes the audience reflect in a light-hearted way on the sometimes absurd reality in which we live, and how the private and public space continuously feed each other”, says Braga. “In addition to the hotel room, I created a Belgian brown café, with typical elements such as sanseverias, beers, bitterballen and fries. Life-size replicas of myself and my partner sit at the table. When we first met, we had hours of conversations about creativity, the ideal world or love. Here too I mix the outside world, through a projection in the window, with the intimate private atmosphere.” (Excerpt of text by Elien Haentjens for COLLECT Magazine)

ELEN BRAGA

The Love Hotel

at Wouters Gallery, Brussels

September 12 - November 9, 2024

opening Thursday September 12, 5-9pm

Special opening hours during Brussels Gallery Weekend (Sept. 12 - 15)

Love as Jam on Bread 

When thinking about Western societies, two spaces are dominant: the public and the private. The public space increasingly appears to be a realm of broadcasting rather than listening. It is a place for discussion where the loudest word and the strongest argument rule. The private space, on the other hand, becomes more enclosed than before. The walls around what is private have become higher, the door is often closed, and an electronic bell with a camera hangs on the front facade.

In a recent interview, political scientist Kiza Magendane argues for a reappraisal of ‘the third space,’ a room between the private and the public. A place where multinationals are absent and citizens from different communities naturally encounter each other.
The interviewer responds: ‘I immediately think of the village pub when you mention your third space.’ ‘Yes,’ Magendane replies, ‘The pub is indeed the perfect third space.’

When artist Elen Braga was invited by Wouters Gallery for a solo show opening on September 12, 2024, she realized that this would be five days after her wedding. And that was precisely what intrigued her. She had been pondering a question for some time: ‘How can I invest in my private life, in my future with someone else, when the world seems to be falling apart?’

She agreed to the exhibition with the wish to make love political.

In the final show, two physical spaces— a hotel and a café—take center stage. They are spaces where intimacy is celebrated, but which do not belong to anyone personally. 

The Antwerp Café

In the months following the invitation, she reconstructed an Antwerp pub out of textiles. These are the brown cafés in her hometown where she has endless conversations with her fiancé, Pieter Vermeulen, and where time seems to stand still. These conversations cover both the mundane and the fundamen- tal, discussing whether love is the same as jam on bread, but also whether evil, like good, resides within us all. Zoomed out, she also sees the pub as an intimate and political space. ‘People in a brown café are all in their own world, but in their conversations, they often talk about what is happening outside. And while you talk, there is football on the TV or a newspaper on the table with the daily news.’ For her final installation, she also conducts conversations with Vermeulen via email. She often writes to him while working in her studio: the mailbox as a café table by candlelight. Sentences from this conversation are used in a video. The video screen is the window to the outside world in Braga’s tufted pub.

Around the location of Wouters Gallery in Brussels, there are six different love hotels. Rooms can be booked by the hour. The hotel is an ideal place where love is consumed. Braga studied in Brussels and finds the hotel a fitting metaphor for the city. Besides the literal abundance of hotels, she observes people in Brussels constantly coming and going; EU parliamentarians arrive just before their meetings and then leave immediately, while refugees often find only a temporary place to stay.

In Wouters Gallery, visitors see a hotel bed with coloured sheets. Here too, as in the café, a conversa- tion is conducted. On the tufted bedspread where a lingerie set is laid out, a part of a conversation is depicted. It depicts the absurd world of 2024 where social media, wars, memes, and conversations with friends arrive simultaneously via social media. The hotel room also features a woollen shower, a TV displaying Trump, and a window through which the street and horizon are visible.

The Personal

The Love Hotel is an exhibition that starts from the deeply personal. On Saturday, September 7, Braga got married, and in her studio, there is a woollen goose that she used as a bouquet. Her wedding dress also hangs in her studio. As if everything in her life and art practice is constantly blending and overflowing. ‘It’s difficult for me to tell other people’s stories because it will always be a shadow of the real story. When I start from my own life, I see Elen as the subject. Elen lives in a context, in a time, in a culture, and with political issues. By zooming in on her life, a sharp image emerges of what exactly is happening in that context. And I think when you, as an artist, are personal in that way, you will also be political.’ What her specific political beliefs are, however, remains deliberately open in her work. Braga was raised Christian and from the church, there was always an answer; everything happened for a reason. ‘When you leave the church and thus that way of thinking, you dare not give answers anymore. Things are much more complex than good and evil, than right or left. I am not Jesus... I want to bring themes to the middle because that’s where there is the most room for an open conversation.’

A curtain hangs behind the hotel bed in the gallery. The bright green fabric drapes in the space, making the image not fully visible. Visitors are allowed to pull back the curtain. Only then do the painted contours of a group of people having sex become visible. A large penis held by another person, breasts, buttocks, squatting people, and spread legs. How do you make love political? Love Hotel is not a cele- bration of private heterosexual love or marriage as an institution. Much more, Braga wants to put love, in the broadest sense of the word, on a stage with her exhibition. It is her response to hatred. Humanity as one big, loving orgy.

Exhibition text by Lieneke Hulshof (curator, teacher & critic)

Photo credit: Luk Vander Plaetse