Objects of Desire: On Treatment Menu's Eros
- M.P.S Simpson
- Dec 22
- 4 min read
Treatment Menu, a collaborative exhibition helmed by Display Fever’s Naz Balkaya and Teaspoon Projects’ Gigi Surel, understands love not just as a feeling to be experienced, but as a practice.
How do we love now? There seems to be an endless stream of descriptors that aim to diagnose the current landscape of love and relationships. Love in the age of digital machinery is a continuous search for the next best thing, the shiniest new person; it seems to dissolve the fabric of what it means to love.
Love is an electric flash amidst the cold, dark milieu of the present. Love bursts from the seams of the unexpected, the communion of souls and bodies that arrives in our lives from a seemingly mystical frontier.
But love is not just a yielding entity, a cliche, nor a passing figure of speech. Love has the capacity for radicalism. Love can function as a disruptive force capable of breaking the greedy, omnivorous chains of capitalism that absorb much of our personal lives and inner sanctums. But for love to have such capabilities, we must understand it not as an intangible feeling, but as a sustained practice, a discipline, and a process.
Treatment Menu, a collaborative exhibition helmed by Display Fever’s Naz Balkaya and Teaspoon Projects’ Gigi Surel, understands love not just as a feeling to be experienced, but as a practice. Configuring love as an art form requires an understanding that love is not a passive-consumptive experience, but a state of labour and risk. To be loved and to love in an age where eros is flattened by the iron-clad fists of globalised capitalism that seeks to pulverise difference, transcendence, and transgression, centering the complex matrices of love, beauty, and labour allows those sticky elements of desire and difference to shine through the darkened edges of our contemporary culture.
Inspired by thinkers such as Byung-Chul Han, Erich Fromm, and bell hooks, the exhibition is structured as a simulated beauty salon. This context draws attention to how love requires ritualistic processes, repetition, labour, and discipline to blossom. Love is not something that arrives at your doorstep; it is not something that is conjured out of thin air. It is something to be worked at, something to be worked for.
With seven artists showcasing their work across a plethora of interdisciplinary artistic mediums, Treatment Menu’s focus straddles the line between razor-sharp and nebulous. The artists — Eva Dixon, Ella Fleck, Hoa Dung Clerget, Natalia Janula, Paula Parole, Julia Thompson, and Harry Whitelock — work through a variety of methods to explore the rituals and objects of love. The exhibition, showcasing scent installations, found objects, sculptures made from nails and hair gel, LED light installations, and more, highlights how we can understand the processes of love as antidotes to a modern condition that commodifies the sanctity of intimacy.
The exhibition began with the development of co-curator Naz Balkaya’s found-object installation Breakup Kit. The piece, fit with a clay-ceramic tray, imagines the dissolution of love through the complex assemblage of objects - such as cigarettes, lighters, and makeup - that we contextualise as part of our identities in the name of self-soothing. In the wake of love-lost, when personal identity feels unmoored and shaken, Breakup Kit objectifies the vectors of care, heartbreak, grief, and longing in the contemporary moment of the ready-made and endlessly accessible. Through these conversations, Treatment Menu was born. What exactly is love, and how does it manifest as emblems in our complex lives? How do we reach for the other in moments of intimacy, when the politics of control demands our focus with an iron-clad grip?
Treatment Menu licks the wounds of love. Love, as a verb, an action, a practice, requires an intensity of intent, a willing plunge into the unseen recesses of the other. In a culture that eats away at difference and drives us towards endless similitude, exploring the complexities of love and its aftermath offers a way to perceive love as multifaceted — sticky, greedy, confusing, affirming, devastating, rich, and tinged with vulnerability. Love necessitates reaching outwards. Love cannot exist singularly: it must always be in search of the other. But the other is an unknown land, upon which, in our narcissism, we project our own inner landscapes. Conceptualising love as a practice, Treatment Menu offers a path for understanding how we, as creatures of comfort, as individuals woven into the wider fabric of community, commandeer rituals and exalt possessions as methods of creating our own languages of love and desire, care and heartbreak, grief and longing.
To finalise the exhibition, Treatment Menu, curated by Sayori Radda, held a reading series to fundraise for the Gaza UNFPA fund. Ed Luker, Jane Dabate, Kate Ebitt, Noor-e-Sehar Ali, Caitlin Hall, Jessica Key, Alison Rumfitt, Vamika Sinha, Christiana Spens, Ozziline Mercedes, and Susanna Davies-Crook all spoke towards Treatment Menu’s theme. Spanning poetry, essay excerpts, prose, and experimental literature, the event materialised - through the diversity, vulnerability, and depth of expression - the necessity of exploring love as a condition through art and literature.
Whilst the print of love marked its shape in the soft snow of the exhibition’s thematic landscape, each writer’s contribution to the evening highlighted that body and soul can possess an amorphous, shifting edge. Love is not experienced in solitude, and yet, our experiences of it can differ so exponentially that having one word for it feels inadequate. We prostrate ourselves at the altar of such universality when it feels that “love” saturates the market of popular culture. But, as Treatment Menu’s exhibition and reading event demonstrates, undertaking such an endeavor requires a sensitivity to the elements of love that pull us into the orbit of potential and devastating loss. Love and loss are dialectically bound, and yet, the latter does not deter us from the former. We risk ourselves, we risk others. We convert self-shame and self-consciousness into beauty. We give things up, and we take things on. We forever reach outwards, in the hope that the other will find us back. 🌀
M.P.S is a writer, zine-maker, part-time urban researcher, full-time perfume over-thinker, maximalist fashion enjoyer, and creature from East London. You can find her looking gorgeous on Instagram as @_femmedetta or giving unsolicited opinions as @cyberyamauba on X.
