Have you ever pondered what real love is? The new community storytelling art project Alexander Milov is bringing to Burning Man's 40th Anniversary this year will create space for festival-goers and the public to share their thoughts on this timeless question.
When the artwork LOVE arrived from the Ukrainian port of Odessa to the Nevada desert in the summer of 2015, it took a life of its own. Its powerful, deceptively simple visual language, depicting two adult figures turning their backs on each other as their inner children long to connect, resonated with tens of thousands of people around the world. Coming from different cultures and stages of life, the viewers interpreted and shared the piece, found new meaning in it, and sometimes weaved it into their own life stories.
“Years after we built LOVE, I met a guy in Bali, who told me he got emotional and got back together with his girlfriend when she sent him the image of the sculpture,” says Milov, the first Ukrainian artist to have received a Black Rock City Honoraria grant to bring the piece to the festival in the summer of 2015.
Milov has a colorful collection of similar anecdotes, and today the artwork's image continues to appear on numerous psychology books covers, tattoos, and thousands of pieces of illegal merchandise sold on Etsy.
Drawing inspiration from viewers’ stories and his own experience of divorce and remarriage, Milov continued to explore the subject of human connection over the following decade and installed artworks from this series in different parts of the world.
This year, he unveils REAL LOVE, the piece that will culminate the series, and in which he intends to turn viewers’ perspectives and experiences into part of the artwork.
Like its predecessors, REAL LOVE is a monumental sculpture representing two adult figures, a man and a woman.Only this time they look in the same direction with open hearts, and their inner children are no longer trapped inside. The figures will be sitting on a structure serving as a living museum in the desert, that will display small replicas of previous pieces in the series, which Milov says, “represent different stages of love.”
But the most innovative and probably the most exciting part of the project will take place in real time on the ground. Milov’s team will record viewers’ testimonies about love and project them onto a large screen in the evenings. After the festival, REAL LOVE will become a traveling exhibition and a participative documentary.
In a world fractured by wars and growing socio-economic gaps, where loneliness has been proclaimed an epidemic, this project, just like Burning Man and its philosophy, may seem idealistic and naïve. But it is responding to one of the most urgent needs in today’s unprecedentedly connected and simultaneously divided world – community and a space for dialogue.
The artwork has been completed thanks to support from the Lotus Arts Fund and Mystic Arts Foundation, and is on its way to the Port of Los Angeles, where it will arrive at the end of July.
The project is now collecting funds to cover the cost of the light and sound equipment and the installation.
