LOVE RULES
We are four women who have lived inside these rules.
We have broken them and been broken by them. We have carried them in our bodies and our minds years after the relationship changed or ended or found its way back to something true.
This work is about love. Complicated, consuming, painful and sometimes the only thing that holds you together.
VASUDHAA NARAYANAN
https://www.instagram.com/vasudhaa
Will The Flowers Grow Through the Asphalt? (2024-ongoing) traces a love challenged by caste, language and religion in contemporary India. Our relationship unfolds within a matrix of inherited differences where love becomes both possibility and provocation. We were both born in the early nineties—at the cusp of a nation’s transformation, as the right-wing Hindutva project began to unravel itself. Our union began as that power reached its zenith. We are children of this ideological shift, formed in its crucible.
‘Through photography, personal texts, and handwritten letters, I trace how our differences shape the mundane, haunting even the softest moments. The work is an evolving attempt to build a language of love and resistance. A love that asks: Who are we? What formed us? How can we meet—wholly —despite what divides us?’
"You can love anyone in the world, but I'm not okay with you being in a relationship with a Muslim man."
It has been a year of us living in this apartment. And six months since my parents stopped talking to me.
I'm afraid of the doorbell. What if the sound gave away where I really was? I am occupied by this thought everytime my parents call while I'm at our apartment.
I casually asked Zeeshan once if his mother wore an abaya or a burqa. I also joked about whether I would need to convert or change my name to 'Ayesha' if we ever did end up together. He laughed it off...
What if, like my father, he becomes religious in our shared future?
Everything changed after his parents' death. The love we shared didn't seem to exist. He is perennially exhausted.
How long do I have to carry the weight of this relationship?
I see him, smell him, touch him— but he isn't there.
I am exhausted by the labour of trying to make us work. I feel the pressure to hide things -- like his anger and his punishing silence. Lately, I feel very alone.
I can't share my struggles with anyone, what if they simply blame it on his religion?
ALEXANDRA VACAROIU
https://www.alexandravacaroiu.com/
https://www.instagram.com/alexandravacaroiu
Alexandra Vacaroiu – [No one reads bedtime stories to mothers anymore] (2026) explores the body as a site of memory, intimacy and return. Through fragmented self-portraiture, moving image and spoken text, I trace the physical and emotional residue of motherhood, marriage, desire, separation and solitude. The work moves through wanting and refusing, being touched and withdrawing, holding and letting go, asking what remains in the body after intimacy has passed. Domestic gestures and traces: hair, bedsheets, pillows, skin, become evidence of relationships and selves inhabited. At its centre is an attempt to understand the body through these accumulated experiences: not to erase what it remembers, but to inhabit it again as my own.
The broken promises.
The vows.
The crying.
The shouting.
The less.
The more.
We gave
and gave.
In lightness.
In weight.
I wake up
to wet pillows.
Teach the parts of me
that held you
to no longer want you.
Stop waiting
for your name
to mean
home.
You said
my voice
was sexy.
But you didn’t hear it
when I asked
to be wanted,
not consumed.
You didn’t hear it
when I said:
Leave.
All this time
I thought
I had to forgive him.
When it was me
all along.
I had to
forgive
myself.
I cleaned
everything.
Through the curtains,
weak light
fights its way in,
only to expose
the dirty glasses.
I was too much of this,
too little of that.
Remember my flaws
as your kids come out screaming
into this world—
the same place you adored
LAUREN JOY KENNETT
https://www.laurenjoykennett.com/
Lauren Joy Kennett – Mistakes and Bad Decisions (2019–ongoing) is an exploration of my experiences navigating undiagnosed autism in the context of intimacy and power. It started as a way to make sense of the toxic relationships I stayed in before I understood myself, before I knew that I struggled to make boundaries or communicate my needs or even process what I wanted. Before I knew I was autistic.
The work captures the scars left by relationships where consent felt like compliance, where desire became obligation, where I lost myself trying to fit into expectations I didn't fully understand.
I didn’t want anyone else to see me like this incase they asked me what was wrong and what had happened and why I was only wearing a coat on top of my underwear and why had I got sick in my hair.
And then I closed the door to my room and climbed into bed and slept for three days and didn’t say anything to anyone.
I rang him when I knew and he came straight over and I cried and then we fucked and I knew it wasn’t a difficult decision to make as long as I had no emotion about it and for the few days we knew I secretly liked feeling it growing inside of me.
And at breaktime at school there was one game that we played and it was called kiss or kill and when a boy caught me i had to choose if i wanted to be kissed or killed which would be a punch or a kick and when I got caught I would choose a kiss that sometimes tasted like hula hoops and sometimes tasted like panda pops and he would say to his friends she’s ok she’s cool for a girl
he tried to stop me and he wouldn’t let me go and he kept calling me day and night and begging me to come back and telling me I’d lied and I’d cheated and that I’d promised to be with him forever and that his life was nothing without me
We fancied boys and we tried on each others clothes in the mirror and practiced poses that we thought made us look sexy and everyone was snogging where you put your tongue into each others mouths and it made you feel dizzy and feel sick but not in a bad way and everyone was talking about who was good at it and who wasn’t good at it and i read the magazines and i practised kissing on my arm like it said and i practised on my girlfriends and soon we all wanted sex.
after my friends were asleep he came into the room and asked me if I was awake and i said yes and he said come with me
so I did
I tried to stop the arguments by being careful about how I said things but that didn’t work because it pissed him off and made him angry and made him want to argue with me even more
you stay up all night and you are clumsy and thirsty and your head starts to pound and you’re trying to work out if it is what you wanted or are you just doing it because its what he wanted or because what you actually wanted was to not be alone
MIKA SPERLING
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https://www.instagram.com/mika_sperling/
Mika Sperling – Red and Blue (2024–present) “When we first met his hair was blue and mine was red”
In her ongoing body of work Red and Blue Mika Sperling guides us through the intense emotional landscape of a long-term romantic relationship following a breach of trust. 'Within the rituals and fragments of everyday life I find metaphors that allow me to believe in healing from the trauma my betrayal caused us both. Drawing from archival images spanning eighteen years with my partner I turn toward reflection —using his body and eyes as a mirror through which to confront and understand my own desires, actions and emotions.'
Right from the beginning our love looked very different from how I had seen it in the movies.
By the end of my first year in California, he flew across the ocean and proposed to me.
After we announced our engagement and An's parents expressed their disapproval, I wrote them a letter.
Their reaction wounded me more than I expected. I left without saying goodbye.
the engagement ring began to lose its color and started to feel itchy, until it even left a rash on my skin.
I made a stop in New York City and met up with a man. At the same time, something small and strange occurred: An's photograph tore itself free from my wallet. And with it, a quiet unraveling began.
I started writing with another man.
I started sleeping with another man.
My therapist later said an affair is like a car crash. We were walking around the city with broken bones and bleeding scalps, trying on wedding suits and dresses instead of seeking professional help.
In the strange lull after New Year's Day, I returned to my birthplace in Russia for the very first time.
During that trip, I found out I was pregnant with our baby.
And then we became parents.
He once described an image that exists only in his mind.
I'm kneeling on the floor, heavily pregnant, folding tiny baby clothes. He watches me from the bed, feeling a deep sorrow -- for not being able to return my love, buried somewhere inside himself.
I began to see myself through his eyes -- tender, human, fallible. And slowly, almost imperceptibly,
I started to forgive myself for my betrayal.
We were born a day and a year apart. The days we turned 35 and 36, I was unexpectedly swallowed by an ocean of such sweet depth, quietly glowing from a hunger for intimacy finally stilled, and asked him to take my picture while my body still held a part of him inside.