Our Cold Loves: Ariane Loze’s intimate experiments with the human gaze

When Belgian artist Ariane Loze speaks, she seems to sculpt each word as if it were part of a performance – deliberate, playful, and charged with subtext. The multidisciplinary filmmaker and performer has built a career on dissolving borders between her many roles. Her art is a living conversation between cinema and performance, between presence and projection, between self and other.

“I’ve always been drawn to the moment where the real and the imagined meet.” “Film gives you control, but live performance gives you vulnerability – and I like to stand exactly where those two collide,” she told the Times in an exclusive interview last week, right after a private showing of Our Cold Loves.

That collision defines Our Cold Loves, her latest work, which has its Asia premiere during the Belgian Days 2025 at the PMQ Taste Library in Hong Kong (6-16 November). The piece exists in two forms – a video artwork and a participatory performance – both exploring how love and intimacy operate in the digital age.

Blending cinema and theatre, Loze invites participants to embody characters from the world of online dating while exposing the fragile mechanics of attraction and detachment that technology amplifies. “It’s about the way we curate ourselves,” she explains. “Apps give us the illusion of control – yet desire is never truly programmable.”

In the video, 22 characters drift through fleeting encounters, their voices stitching together a portrait of affection mediated by screens. The live version mirrors that structure: 22 participants sit around a long dining table, as though invited to an exquisite meal. Each receives a fragment of dialogue drawn from the film, which they reassemble into a new montage – a collective reinterpretation of Loze’s script.

“There’s no fixed outcome,” she says. “Every group reshapes the piece differently. What matters is how people inhabit those words – how they fill the silences between them.”

The performance dissolves the line between audience and actor. Cameras observe quietly, capturing glances and hesitations as dialogue shifts between scripted and spontaneous. To a live spectator, it feels like a film in the making – a reading or rehearsal before shooting a scene.

Ariane Loze during a private showing of Our Cold Loves, at Hong Kong’s PMQ

The tension of preparation becomes part of the work itself. “It’s not about perfection,” Loze notes. It’s about revealing what’s hidden beneath politeness: “When you give people permission to play, they often show you their truth.”

That interplay between viewer and viewed has been the thread through Loze’s career. Trained in visual arts, she began in Belgium in 2008 by filming herself performing multiple characters in a single frame – writing, directing, acting and editing each short film. “Back then, I was performing for the lens, not for people,” she recalls. “Now, everyone’s gaze is part of the work.”

The evolution from solo video practice to participatory theatre accelerated during the pandemic. “COVID forced us to face ourselves in isolation,” she says. “It also proved that intimacy doesn’t require physical proximity. That realization reshaped my work completely.”

Our Cold Loves makes that lesson visible. Around the table, the boundary between performance and confession blurs. Participants exchange phrases of longing, jealousy or hesitation – words once spoken into phones now shared with strangers. Loze hovers nearby like a conductor guiding invisible rhythms, adjusting tone and light.

“It’s always a risk,” she admits. “You invite strangers to be vulnerable together. But that’s also what I love – the risk of emotional honesty.”

Among the Hong Kong participants were figures from the city’s cultural and diplomatic circles, including the Belgian Consul General and his wife, both of whom, Loze says with a laugh, “were fearless – completely open to diving in.” The performance thus becomes a small, self-contained society – an ephemeral portrait of connection in an age of curated distance.

Loze resists easy labels. “I don’t see disciplines,” she says. “I see conversations.” Every medium is just another language for the same question: what does it mean to be seen?

That question haunts all her works. In earlier pieces, she filmed herself in mirrored boxes or projected pre-recorded dialogues that spectators were asked to answer. Each experiment chips away at the comfort zone of spectatorship. “People come expecting to watch,” she says. “But what happens when they realize they are being watched too? Suddenly, the performance becomes a dialogue about how we construct ourselves under observation – by a camera, by others, by society.”

In Our Cold Loves, the theme of love becomes a metaphor for that visibility. “Love is not an emotion; it’s a movement toward someone,” Loze muses. “When you allow yourself to be seen, you move toward another person. That’s the essence of what I’m exploring.”

This marks her first performance of its kind in Asia. As for Macau, she smiles: “I haven’t performed there yet, but I’ve been there. Macau feels very cinematic to me – full of contrasts, layers, and mystery. It’s a place where different times and textures coexist.”

She pauses, eyes glimmering with that familiar mix of director and dreamer. “Art, for me, is always about meeting the unfamiliar – in others, in places, in ourselves.”

Macau seems like a perfect next encounter.

Event info

Our Cold Loves – Asia premiere
Belgian Days 2025, Nov 06–16
PMQ 5/F Taste Library. Hong Kong
Register: www.belgiandays.hk

Paulo Coutinho, Hong Kong