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

The University at Buffalo Art Galleries is pleased to announce I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality, an exhibition guest-curated by Sylvie Fortin that spans both the UB CFA and UB Anderson Gallery locations. The exhibition opens at the Center for the Arts Gallery on Thursday, November 10 with an evening reception and Saturday, November 12 at the Anderson Gallery with a midday reception and artist talks.

Bringing together new and recent works by 17 international artists, I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality invites us to consider how hospitality has simultaneously defined and confined 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.

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.

Hospitality is usually considered a philosophical concept with legal implications, an ethical concern, a social/political practice… or an industry. In this exhibition, Fortin shifts the focus to consider the stealth work of hospitality on our conceptual, material, and political understanding of bodies. How has the covert reach of hospitality led to the very notion of a “human” body, fleshing out its outlines by setting it apart from other throbbing constellations of life forms? How has hospitality’s invisible labor sustained the extractive intersection of race, gender, class, religion, and value? To what prison-house of flesh and mind has hospitality’s dance of welcoming and exclusion confined us? Can hospitality, in turn, yield other choreographies?

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.

I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality excavates the body’s storied genealogy, critically points to its living legacy, imagines other more-than-human hospitable modalities, and opens up an expanded theater of operations. In the process, it joyfully welcomes a host of interspecies intimacies and live-wired storylines.

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.