The launch event for The Museum of Dating took place on Friday 10 February 2023 at 6.30pm.

Curator, Valentina Peri was in conversation with Watermans’ Head of New Media Arts Development, Klio Krajewska.

Online dating has only recently become a culturally and socially acceptable phenomenon, but the use of technology to match singles has a long history. In the 1960s, computerized dating systems appeared in the Anglo-American world, which worked through questionnaires and customized algorithms.

The aim of the exhibition “The Museum of Dating” is to place the contemporary phenomenon of online dating within a spectrum of older technologies, practices, narratives, cultural and media artifacts.

Curator Valentina Peri presents for the first time her movie “Joan Ball. The Lady of Computer Dating”, together with an ongoing timeline of the history of dating with a focus on England and the emergence of dating mediated by computerized technology, from the 50’s to the creation of the first online dating site in the mid 90s. Part of the exhibition is also a selection of cultural artifacts and mass culture productions that are put into perspective through this chronological reconstruction.

The Museum of Dating makes it possible to shed new light on key categories of historical understanding such as gender, generation, class, race and social status, through analysis of the power dynamics at play in partner selection. This historical study of dating can also help to better understand the ability of seemingly neutral technologies to extend the power and belief systems of particular groups, replicate heteronormative categories and create new social needs.

Valentina Peri is an independent curator, artist and author based in Paris.

Her work examines the role of technology in contemporary culture, with a focus on love and intimacy in the digital age, media histories and technologies in the anthropocene.

She has curated exhibitions, published writing and given lectures on a broad range of topics in these areas, including data collection and surveillance, the commodification of desire, representation and identity, media ecologies and new materialism.

Her traveling exhibition Data Dating has been presented in France, Israel and the UK. In the context of this exhibition, she edited an essay collection published by Intellect: Data Dating. Love, Technology, Desire (2021).

Her research about dating continues with the exhibition SWIPE RIGHT! Data, Dating, Desire she curated at iMAL, Brussels in 2021, TECHNO ROMANCE presented at Electron in Geneva in 2022, and DATA DATING DESIRE, a new iteration of this traveling exhibition in a baroque palace in Italy in the fall 2022.

In 2022, she started researching the phenomenon of Internet romance scams in Ghana, and published the book “The New Romance Scammer’s Instructor”, a collection of original messages from Ghanaian love scammers.

She is one of the artists in residence in 2022 of the European program BEYOND MATTER Eu

– at Tirana Art Lab (Albania), where she realized “Her Boyfriend Came Back from the War. And They Never Spoke About it Again”, an augmented reality project based on the history and photographic archive of her grandfather during World War II, and her grandparents’ love correspondence.

She received a Fluxus Art Projects Grant 2022 for her curatorial research on the history of dating to be presented in an exhibition at Watermans London from February to May 2023.

Since 2021 she collaborates as a Guest Curator with peer-to-space, an independent exhibition platform based in Berlin, that realizes virtual and IRL exhibitions.

From 2011-21, Valentina was associate director and curator at Galerie Charlot Paris – Tel Aviv, where she curated more than twenty exhibitions with internationally renowned artists, such as Quayola, Eduardo Kac, Sabrina Ratté, Manfred Mohr…

Valentina is also a co-founder of SALOON Paris, an international and diverse network of women identifying art professionals, in Paris and many other cities, part of the SALOON Network.