The Hospitality of Images

with Behzad Khosravi Noori, Dawit L. Petros, and Felipe Steinberg

Join us for an engaging discussion and Q&A exploring the hospitality of still and moving images. This panel brings together three artists, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Dawit L. Petros, and Felipe Steinberg, whose new projects featured in the current issue of PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas bear witness to the power of images–documentary, staged, animated, and gaming–to harbor and encode traces, memories, and emotions, which they relay and render as meaning, recollection, belonging, or exclusion. Edited by curator/critic and Bemis 2019–2021 Curator-in-Residence Sylvie Fortin, this publication examines the currencies of hospitality.

PANELISTS:
Born in Tehran, BEHZAD KHOSRAVI NOORI is an artist and writer based in Stockholm. Khosravi Noori’s artistic research uses personal experience as a springboard to establish a hypothetical relationship between personal memories and significant world events, between micro- and macro-histories. His practice enlists films, installations, and archival studies to investigate histories from the Global South, including those of political relationships that have offered a counter-narrative to the Cold War East-West dichotomy. He mines contemporary history to raise questions about border-crossing memories in order to explore their entanglements and non/alignments. He examines the fate of narratives when they cross borders and the future of our collective past. Khosravi Noori is a Ph.D. candidate at Konstfack/KTH Stockholm, Sweden, finalizing a dissertation entitled “Three or Four Ir/relevant Stories: Art in Hyper-Politics.”

DAWIT L. PETROS’s photographic and installation work is informed by research in global modernisms, constructions of modernity, theories of diaspora, and postcolonial studies. Petros completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, an M.F.A. in Visual Art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University, a B.F.A. in Photography at Concordia University, and a B.A. in History at the University of Saskatchewan. He is Assistant Professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

FELIPE STEINBERG is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers constructed meanings of the local and the global through processes of decontextualization and recontextualization. He enlists various types of media and systems of circulation to explore the thickness between social spaces and interpersonal encounters. Steinberg attended the Whitney Independent Study Program (2019), The Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (2016–2018), and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). He has been an artist-in-residence at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha (2019), and RAW Material Company, Dakar (2019). His work has been presented internationally. He has been awarded the Idea Fund Prize from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2017), and support from the Houston Arts Alliance Artists Individuals Grant Program (2018), among others. Steinberg is the co-founder of ACCA (Art and Culture in Contexts of Authoritarianisms), a working group studying, discussing, and articulating collective and individual responses to contexts of authoritarianism with a special focus on Brazil.

MODERATOR / EDITOR:
SYLVIE FORTIN is an independent curator, researcher, critic, and editor based between Montreal, New York, and Omaha, NE, where she is the Curator-in-Residence 2019-2021 at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. She was Executive and Artistic Director of La Biennale de Montréal (2013–2017), Executive Director/Editor of ART PAPERS in Atlanta (2004–2012), and Curator of Manif d’art 5 – the 5th Quebec City Biennial (2010). Her reviews have been published in numerous periodicals, including Artforum International, ART PAPERS, C Magazine, and Flash Art International, and her essays have appeared in many catalogues, readers, and anthologies. She is also Editor of PASS, the journal of the International Biennial Association.

ABOUT PUBLIC 61, Currencies of Hospitality

Hospitality is usually considered a philosophical concept, an ethical concern with juridical implications, a sociopolitical practice … or an industry. This publication shifts the focus to speculate on many of its other (often stealth) manifestations. It mobilizes hospitality—as concept, metaphor, performance, and dissidence—to render its pluripotent agency.

This 320-page issue of PUBLIC is also a critical curatorial endeavour that weaves together artists’ projects, fiction, scholarly research, and other indefinable forms to explore some of the unexpected valences of hospitality in modern and contemporary art, cinema, animation, and exhibition making; in architecture, infrastructure, land use, and practices of cohabitation; in kinship and care; and in justice, pedagogy, and reparation.

Issue contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, Bojana Videkanic, Diego Semerene, Sara Swain, Behzad Khosravi Noori, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Andrew Stooke, Justin Langlois, Charlie Hailey, Claudia Ruitenberg, Karen Meyer, Cynthia Nicol, Dawit L. Petros, Felipe Steinberg, Megan Rooney, Tamar Guimarães, Lisa Baldissera, Shannon R. Stratton, Kelly Kaczynski, Mark Jeffery, Kelly Lloyd.

Order your copy of PUBLIC 61, Currencies of Hospitality.

This conversation is part of a dynamic month-long series celebrating the release of the latest issue of PUBLIC, which offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the currencies of hospitality. This series mobilizes and amplifies the publication, positioning it as a relay for the exchange of ideas, and a vector for attentive engagement, open debate, and speculation around questions of hospitality.

IMAGE: Behzad Khosravi Noori, A Monument to the Invisible Citizen (2020). Exhibition at HDLU, Zagreb. Photo: Juraj Vuglač.