LOVE Art-Icon Reframed Paris Art Week
Mila Jaso
LOVE at the Bastille Design Center During Paris Art Week, Art-Icon turned one of the city’s most iconic venues into a meditation on desire, identity, and human connection.
Art-Icon presented “LOVE” at the Bastille Design Center during Paris Art Week. The exhibition, Art-Icon stood out as a highlight of the week. Curated by Danila Tkachenko and Slavica Veselinović, it ran over three days and brought together more than 200 photographers alongside major contemporary names. They responded to a single, loaded question. What does love look like today? Through photography, installation, video, and multimedia work, the exhibition carved out a space for intimacy, desire, identity, and human connection. In doing so, it made room for something Paris Art Week rarely offers.
The exhibition gathered some of contemporary art’s most uncompromising voices. Marina Abramović, Ai Weiwei, ORLAN, Roger Ballen. Together, they pushed into territory that feels urgent right now. Intimacy, desire, identity. Consequently, the result was dense, layered, and at times uncomfortable. In the best way. Notably, the exhibition served as a true Art-Icon showcase.
An Unlikely Room
The crowd matched the ambition. Artists, collectors, writers, and cultural figures moved through the space over three days. Marilyn Manson, ORLAN, and Cynthia Ross were among those who attended. Indeed, the kind of room where the guests are as much a part of the work as the work itself. This Exhibition drew art lovers and icons alike into one immersive environment.
One piece commanded the space. Lindsay Elizabeth Warner suspended a monumental series of Marilyn Manson portraits inside the historic architecture of the Bastille Design Center. Above all, it was in this Art-Icon exhibition that her series gained a powerful resonance. In particular, the large-scale cross-shaped installation sparked a conversation about celebrity, devotion, and image-making. Warner shoots primarily on analog film, and her portraits move between nostalgia and immediacy. She leaves her audience to come up with their own interpretation. As a result, that openness worked in the installation’s favor. People stopped. People stared. The work held its ground.
On May 27, the exhibition shifted register. Furthermore, poet Cynthia Ross and Joseph Matick took the floor for a reading that brought a literary dimension to the program. Intimacy, memory, language. LOVE, it turns out, has many formats. In summary, the Art-Icon event lived up to its title as an iconic exhibition.
Share this post
I grew up in a house divided between two worlds, the tennis court and the front row. For years, high-level competition was everything, until an injury forced me to stop and ask a different question. The answer led me to art direction and communication, and something clicked. It felt less like a change of path and more like arriving at the one I was always meant to take.
I believe fashion is never only about clothes. It is the silhouette you choose, the way you walk into a room, the story you bring to a piece of fabric, whether you intend it to or not.
For me, pursuing the intersection of fashion and art direction is the natural expression of that belief. A space where visual language and creative storytelling become one.
Read Next
