Treatment Menu is a collaborative exhibition between Teaspoon Projects and Display Fever, bringing together artists and curators in a shared inquiry into the labour, risk, and renewal that love demands. The exhibition takes its cue from thinkers like Erich Fromm and bell hooks, who describe love not as a passive emotion but as an art form — a verb rather than a noun. In the midst of a post-capitalist culture obsessed with productivity, aesthetics, and possession, Treatment Menu asks what it means to love with intention and courage. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han observes, eros has been drained of transcendence under global capitalism, leaving us to seek connection through surfaces and screens. This exhibition reclaims love as an act of resistance — a practice of care, honesty, and persistence that insists on depth in an age of simulation.

Treatment Menu transforms the exhibition space into an experimental beauty salon — a site of ritual, touch, and transformation where art and care converge. Each artwork becomes a ‘treatment’, a gesture toward healing, curiosity, or renewal. Through this shared curatorial framework, the two platforms extend their ongoing dialogue about how artistic collaboration can itself be an act of love — one that balances vulnerability with trust, and structure with improvisation.

Exhibiting artists: Eva Dixon/Ella Fleck/Hoa Dung Clerget/Natalia Janula/Paula Parole/Julia Thompson/Harry Whitelock

Across the exhibition, the featured artists approach love through diverse materials, mythologies, and lived experiences. Eva Dixon interrogates queerness, labour, and gender with humour and defiance, while Hoa Dung Clerget reframes nail art and ornamental aesthetics within the politics of migration and displacement. Julia Thompson channels heartbreak and grief into fragile yet defiant works, and Harry Whitelock explores disintegrating mythologies and memory through the decay of surfaces. Ella Fleck examines manipulation and desire’s distortions; Natalia Janula exposes how love dissolves into spectacle under hyper-capitalism; and Paula Parole merges self-fiction with theory, playfully dissecting patterns of attachment and fantasy.

Co-curator Naz Balkaya’s sculptural work Breakup Kit (2025) lies at the heart of the exhibition — a tender and ironic exploration of heartbreak in a culture of consumer comforts. Each object becomes a metaphor for the ways we substitute consumption for care. The conversations surrounding this piece became the seed for Treatment Menu, evolving through friendship, dialogue, and shared emotional labour between artists and curators alike.

For curator Gigi Surel, the exhibition also emerges from personal experience — the convergence of grief, care, and the fragile beauty of small rituals. In this context, visits to the beauty salon become metaphors for love’s repetitions: moments of conversation, attention, and fleeting restoration. Through the collaborative efforts of Teaspoon Projects and Display Fever, Treatment Menu expands beyond an exhibition to become an act of disclosure — a collective attempt to reclaim love from irony and commodification, and to restore it as a radical, sustaining force.

Ultimately, Treatment Menu proposes that love, like art, requires commitment and risk. It must be tended to, repeated, and reimagined — not as a fleeting fall, but as a sustained standing. Through its collaborative spirit, the exhibition affirms that only love — expressed through care, honesty, and creative labour — has the power to heal the wounds of the past and offer new possibilities for being together.