MADEYOULOOK is an artists’ collaborative working in Johannesburg. For the past four years, we have been thinking about issues of ‘black love’. We are interested in love, specifically romantic love, as an intellectual concept, worthy of rigorous and critical engagement. It is difficult to speak about love in this way. In contemporary art, it is largely a subject relegated to the arena of emotion and not warranting serious intellectual consideration. Contemporary art has disassociated itself radically from its Romantic past and today addresses such subjects with cynicism and even disdain. It is not difficult to dismiss love, to challenge its relevance, to question its existence. It is far more difficult to begin to speak about love as a potentially subversive and illuminating subject.

We are particularly interested in black love and thinking about how ‘black people in love’ can serve as a subject of inquiry that might bring to the fore new or nuanced understandings of our contemporary moment. Part of the difficulty of this discussion is its complexity and its entanglement with broader issues of black life, and this difficulty represents itself in this chapter, which potentially covers too many areas and is in some parts introductory. Nonetheless we attempt it because we see it as important. It is important to speak about black love because the subject is so underrepresented, especially in South Africa. Few narratives exist of black people in love, both in popular and critical discourse. Rather, the tropes of hypersexuality, the black body, promiscuity, and lovelessness assume all the spaces for imagining black people in love. There must exist a space for considering black love as love in itself, as intimacy, care, and mutual recognition.

In 2014, MADEYOULOOK produced a body of work entitled Corner loving that consisted of drawings, texts, and a series of lectures, in order to explore love and black love in complex urban settings. The ongoing body of work initially existed as an exhibition shown at GoetheonMain in Johannesburg, and later revised for Ellipses journal in 2015 (MADEYOULOOK 2015). ‘Corner loving’ is a term we have adopted for the practice of lovers meeting on street corners, often at night. It occurs in places such as townships and the inner city of Johannesburg.