Exhibitions
'Hors Pistes' explores the rules of love at the Centre Pompidou Málaga
What happens when love ceases to be understood as an intimate feeling and becomes also a territory of negotiation, expectations, roles, and power relations? This is one of the questions explored in Love at Stake , the tenth edition of Hors Pistes , the international festival born at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which returns to the Centre Pompidou Málaga to analyze, through contemporary art, the ways in which we construct and represent our affective bonds.
The exhibition, open from October 1 to November 2, 2026, brings together the work of twelve artists from different generations: Aurora Mititelu, Valentina Peri, Ghérasim Luca, Mickaël Berdugo, François Bonenfant, Ariane Loze, Valérie Mréjen, Ana Esteve Reig, Núria Güell, Louise Pressager, Alicia Framis, and Marta Azparren. Through their works, the festival offers a diverse perspective on a feeling as universal as it is difficult to define.
Love appears everywhere: in songs, films, stories, and images that form part of our collective imagination. However, this constant presence doesn't mean it's a simple experience. It can be associated with happiness and desire, but also with dependence, frustration, projection, or emancipation. Love at Stake takes this contradiction as its starting point to examine the mechanisms at play in our relationships.
Abel & I, 2023-2024 © Aurora Mititelu.
The title of this edition alludes to the almost playful dimension that accompanies many romantic experiences. Seduction involves establishing codes, interpreting signals, constructing appearances, and assuming certain roles. But this game is far from neutral. Beneath the surface of desire lie social expectations, misunderstandings, and imbalances that can transform the emotional bond into a space of negotiation and even domination.
The selected works thus address different ways of constructing, imagining, and questioning relationships. Words take on a fundamental role, because it is also through language that feelings are constructed and what we understand as love is shaped. Similarly, new technologies have profoundly altered the ways we meet, relate to one another, and project an identity to others, introducing new codes into a territory that until recently seemed reserved for intimacy.
Words of Love. An essay on passions, 2024 © Núria Güell.
The exhibition moves between fiction and reality, between the lightheartedness of play and the gravity of what might lie hidden behind a relationship. Identities, the gaze of the other, passion, seduction, and social structures appear as elements of the same stage on which each individual interprets and negotiates their own role.
With its tenth edition, Hors Pistes maintains its commitment to using the museum space as a platform from which to observe the present through moving images and contemporary photography. Originally created by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the festival has established itself as a space for research into the ways in which contemporary artists interpret the transformations of the world.
L'amour vache, 2014 © Louise Pressager.
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