Broken Hearts Hotel

Broken Hearts Hotel by Katarzyna Perlak explores the potential of the “love hotel” as a temporary, utopian non-space in which we can reinvent love, relationships and ourselves. Its empty corridors and private rooms hold tender correspondences filled with love, longing, desire, sorrow and heartbreak.

On Valentine’s Day, audiences are invited to call in to the hotel for a one-on-one virtual encounter with the artist. Katarzyna Perlak will meet participants one at a time for a 40-minute video call. During the time together, callers can choose to overshare or overhear broken heart histories, take or give an intimacy quiz, dance together, or have a love letter read just for them.

The work was first commissioned for the Remote Intimacies, a series of performances organized by the Leslie Lohman Museum of Arts (NYC) and The ONE Archive at the University of Southern California (LA). Commissioned artists were invited to explore how intimacy has been sustained in highly mediated times, and how to imagine opportunities for communion across temporal and geographic distances. 

Read more about the work

Katarzyna will be screening the accompanying film work, Broken Hearts Hotel, made in 2021, on Thursday 17 February at Toynbee Studios for Broken Hearts Club: Live at Toynbee Studios, an evening of artists’ films and performance celebrating queer love, loss and heartbreak.