Declaration of Love to Lenin, Juana Dolores Romero Casanova
By Charlotte Stace
Declaration of Love to Lenin brings Juana Dolores Romero Casanova’s confrontational political imagination to La Virreina, marking her first museum exhibition. A writer, performer and artist from El Prat de Llobregat, she uses the show to ask whether love can exist outside capitalism, and what it might mean to reconnect love with revolution, class consciousness and disobedience.
At the centre is a new film, Declaration of Love to Lenin, where the artist performs a deliberately provocative statement around desire, resentment, ideology and political commitment. The exhibition also includes First Self-Portrait and The History of My Class Consciousness, bringing together personal archives, revolutionary imagery and autobiographical material.
Bold and uncomfortable in places, this is not an exhibition that tries to soothe. Rather, it treats love as a force of rupture, conflict and radical possibility.