Tears of Eros

Tears of Eros, a major exhibition devoted to the torments of passion: the dark side of sexual desire. The title of the exhibition was taken from the book by the French writer Georges Bataille, Les larmes d’Eros, and was based on a number of his ideas on eroticism, such as the prohibition/transgression dialectic and the identification of the erotic with religious sacrifice. The exhibition had a global, pansexual character, covering the widest range of orientations and types of desire: the male and female gaze and the heterosexual and homosexual one, voyeurism and exhibitionism, bondage and sadomasochism, and the different varieties of fetishism. All these differing aspects were to be found within the compendium of the myths of Eros, both those deriving from the Greco-Roman Olympus and those originating in the Bible. The present exhibition illustrated the survival of these myths up to the present day and their transformation in the modern era, a process that had given them new, perverse meanings.