Whether guest or host – these are not the only narratives that the celestial concierge XENIA questions during her tour of a virtual hotel that becomes a fictional exhibition space.
The idea for the concept stems from a curatorial interest in exploring possible meanings of “hospitality” through a decontextualization of art. For this purpose, artistic works were originally intended to be removed from their “home” perceived as natural and temporarily embedded in the hotel’s surroundings.
Due to the impossibility of pursuing this project, the artworks change their habitat again and find their digital translation in the form of the video work “XENIA: hello stranger, be my guest”, which is an artistic product in itself.
Guided by an avatar, the visitors embark on a virtual tour through the guest rooms of a fictitious hotel, in which they have to discover artistic positions that show a certain parallelism between the concept of “hospitality” and the characteristics of the hotel and whose guest rooms want to be drawn.
In doing so, any points of connection between the consideration of the hotel room as a temporary (spatial) situation – which moves between the areas of the private and public – and aspects of globalization or (political + institutional) definitions of a supposed inside and outside as well as determining body politics within public spaces are to be examined Contributions by contemporary artists are revealed and questioned.
While the analogue version of this artistic-curatorial intervention would have brought up the boundaries between the private and the public through the individual behaviour of the guests – who move freely between the different hotel rooms – in a performative way, the digital version is much more concerned with the Ask who is the guest and who is the host.
Vincent Everaerts, Yannick Harter, Natalia Jordanova, Cynthia Montier, Nemo Nonnenmacher, Raiko Sánchez, Lore Sommereyns with guest curators; Lucie Klysch und Mia Junker
Video-animation: Raiko Sánchez
Sound-Design: Damian Dalla Torre
Dubbing voice XENIA: Lauretta van de Merwe
Curated by Jeroen Cavents, Ewa Meister & Johanna Ralser
In cooperation with a&o kunsthalle, Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst & Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
