Visual Arts

Where does hospitality take place? This question is the cornerstone of Spring Workshop’s fall program Des hôtes: a foreigner, a human, an unexpected visitor. The program takes its title from the French word hôte, which means both “host” and “guest.” This is a starting point for contemplating the entanglements and blurred territories inherent to the politics of hospitality. Des hôtes considers how the definitions of host and guest can be expanded beyond the realms of domesticity and interpersonal relations. By tracing their manifestations through structures of cognitive meaning and behavior, as well as through our relationships with animals, it reveals how we receive and relate to one another as human beings.

The exhibition opens with a cluster of existing and new artworks by Kasper Bosmans, Toshie Takeuchi and Yu Honglei, which situate the program’s enquiry within the private sphere. Yu’s uncanny sculptures and household ready-mades form a landscape of estrangement; Takeuchi’s film installation and photograph series reflect on the permutations of human-canine relationships; Bosmans’ new miniature paintings and sand carpets trace the domestic use of folk art in 18th-century kitchens and annotate his conversations with the curator on the material expression of hospitality and support.

Over the course of three months, the full exhibition gradually takes shape through an ongoing event program: Kasper Bosmans’ guided tour of strange tales and anecdotes offers entry points into his “Legend” paintings on themes from the exhibition; Raimundas Malašauskas’ post-hypnosis session explores the threshold of our inner subjectivity; Milena Bonilla and Luisa Ungar invite audience members to join them for a performative gathering and engage in a chocolate scrying session; Luisa Ungar enlists the help of an expert in presenting research on relationships between public space and animality; and finally, Trevor Yeung solicits personal stories from other Lonesome Georges in the wild. The eventual artworks on view function as prompts for—and evidence of—these artist-led gatherings. Traversing the various circumstances where the host-guest status quo is stretched and ruptured, Des hôtes creates a web of relations that magnify the reality of how we negotiate our positions as eternal hôtes.