I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality at UB Art Galleries

November 10, 2022–May 12, 2023

I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality, an exhibition guest-curated by Sylvie Fortin and taking place at both the UB CFA and UB Anderson Gallery, is presently on display at the University of Buffalo Art Galleries. On November 10, the Center for the Arts Gallery will host the opening of the exhibit.

I don’t know you like that brings together current and new works by 17 international artists. The Bodywork of Hospitality challenges us to consider how our conceptions of what bodies are, what they are capable of, how we feel they relate to one another, who we think they can encounter, and ultimately how they interact with one another and the world, have been simultaneously defined and constrained by hospitality.

Artists featured in the exhibition are Eglė Budvytytė, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Celina Eceiza, Adham Faramawy, Mounir Fatmi, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Luis Jacob, Lynne Marsh, Rodney McMillian, Lucas Michael, Bridget Moser, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Berenice Olmedo, Slinko, and Ana Torfs.

Generally speaking, hospitality is viewed as a philosophical idea with legal ramifications, an ethical issue, a social/political practice, or an industry. In this show, Fortin turns the emphasis to investigate how our conceptual, material, and political knowledge of bodies is impacted by the covert activity of hospitality. How did the idea of a “human” body come to be, fleshing out its outlines by distinguishing it from other pulsing constellations of life forms? How has the exploitative junction of race, gender, class, religion, and value been supported through the unseen labor of hospitality? What physical and mental prison has hospitality’s dance of inclusion and exclusion kept us in? Can hospitality produce other choreographies in turn?

The exhibition explores these questions in space, weaving together open-ended experiential connections between works in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, textile, installation, and performance as well as lens- and time-based practices. I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality addresses several themes, including xeno|transplantation, implantation, and transfusion; neural adaptation and the phantom limb; bacteria and the microbiome; viruses, parasites, symbionts, and holobionts; mechanical and chemical prostheses; imaging technologies; architectures of corporeal hospitality; dreams and dreamwork; magic and the “miraculous” work of relics, spirits, and energies.

That is not how I know you: The Bodywork of Hospitality explores the body’s rich history, challenges its contemporary legacy, imagines various forms of non-human hospitality, and expands the theater of action. While doing so, it gleefully accepts a variety of interspecies intimacy and dynamic plotlines.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication and dynamic public programs, free and open to students and the general public.

The first iteration of I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality was presented at Bemis Center for the Arts in Omaha, Nebraska in 2021–2022. This exhibition is supported, in part, by the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Robert T. Guelcher, MD, & Mrs. Elizabeth A. Guelcher Fund.

The University at Buffalo Art Galleries
Center for the Arts
201 Center for the Arts
Buffalo, NY 14260
USA
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11am–5pm

T +1 716 645 6912
[email protected]

www.buffalo.edu
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