I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality

Have you ever considered the interplay between the body and hospitality? Or wondered how hospitality might be fleshed out? Or embodied?

Developed for Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts by 2019-2021 Curator-in-Residence Sylvie Fortin, the ambitious group exhibition brings together the works of 18 contemporary artists to explore corporeal hospitality. Hospitality is usually considered a philosophical concept with juridical implications, an ethical concern, or a social/political practice. This group exhibition shifts the focus to consider the stealth work of hospitality on our conceptual, physical, political, and historical understanding of bodies.

I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality invites visitors to consider how hospitality has simultaneously circumscribed what we think bodies are, what we imagine they can do, how we feel they relate, whom we believe they can encounter, and ultimately, how they engage with each other and in the world. The exhibition explores these questions in space by weaving together open-ended experiential connections between works in a range of media, from painting, sculpture, textile, installation and performance to lens- and time-based practices. These works explore several questions, including pregnancy and surrogacy; transplantation, implantation and transfusion; neural adaptation and the phantom limb; bacteria and the microbiome; viruses, parasites, symbionts and holobionts; stem cells; mechanical and chemical prosthetics; architectures and protocols of corporeal hospitality; dreams and dreamwork; and the “miraculous” work of relics, spirits and energies. In the process, the exhibition reveals a storied genealogy that points to the extractive intersection of race, gender, class, religion and value. I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality critically excavates this legacy and offers up an expanded theater of operations.