The Last Human Kiss

The Last Human Kiss brings together contemporary artworks by some of the world’s leading artists including Tracey Emin, Wolfgang Tillmans, Sally Mann, Sonia Boyce, Shilpa Gupta, Patty Chang, Dorothy Cross, Ty Locke, Sophie Barber, Oliver Beer and Zheng Bo, as well as new works on display for the first time by Ṣọlá Olúlòde and Paula Turmina and a painting created especially for the exhibition by Benjamin Spiers, together with historical objects and artworks to explore the kiss as a symbol through which societies have imagined intimacy, negotiated power, and given form to love itself.

From historical representations of the kiss between two people to a digital world of beyondhuman expressions in the 21st century. The Last Human Kiss explores the kiss as a universal language through which desire, power, vulnerability and transcendence have been expressed and contested. Few gestures appear more natural, yet across cultures the meeting of lips has consecrated monarchs, sealed treaties, betrayed lovers, and quietly altered the course of history. The exhibition asks: if the kiss is not simply instinctive, but one of humanity’s most enduring cultural inventions, what might it reveal about the fragile, contradictory and deeply social nature of being human?

Unfolding across five thematic chapters, The First Kiss, The Social Kiss, The Divine Kiss, The Romantic Kiss and The Trickster Kiss, the exhibition traces how artists have returned to the kiss as a way of thinking about connection and the human condition.

The Last Human Kiss is curated John Kenneth Paranada, formerly Curator of Art and Climate Change at the Sainsbury Centre.

The Last Human Kiss is part of the Sainsbury Centre’s How Do We Find Love? exhibition season.

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Image top: Goldweight representing human couple, c.1700 – 1899, brass, Ghana, Africa. Donated by Robert and Lisa Sainsbury, 1973 © Sainsbury Centre. Photograph: Denisa Ilie