Love Bomb

Natasha Caruana 2012

An image of a small orange and a small lemon shows them punctuated all over with cloves and placed on a sparse wooden table alongside a white wall. It is accompanied by a text describing how they may be used to provoke desire. They sit alongside photographs of other love potions and home-made bombs, each with their recipes transcribed. Desperate to sustain love for a former partner, Natasha Caruana hunted love potion recipes and spells online and created and photographed them. As a metaphor for the self-destructive elements of falling out of love, she also collected and photographed online directions for homemade bombs. The display includes ‘hate news’ – ‘small item’ newspaper cuttings describing unpleasant acts conducted by disappointed lovers which demonstrate the hate and rancour that populate daily newspapers. Caruana was interested to collect these as an antidote to the dominant, more often ‘headlining’ perpetual newsfeeds of love and marriage as the ultimate objectives of our lives, at a time when her achieving that felt impossible.

Materials

C-type photographs with text and paper. Giclée photograph.

Exhibition

Data Anthropologies: Natasha Caruana Love is an Act
17 July - 16 December 2015 at the Open Data Institute

Data Types

Shared, Social

About the Artist

Natasha Caruana (b.1983) is a photographic artist whose work is characterised by bold and inventive uses of performative strategies, sharply tuned interpersonal skills and scientific processes. She is concerned with narratives of love, betrayal and fantasy,…
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Love Bomb, Natasha Caruana, 2012