Des hôtes: a foreigner, a human, an unexpected visitor

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 strikingly can mean either “host” or “guest”. This is also a starting point for contemplating the entanglements and blurred territories inherent to the politics of hospitality.

The exhibition will open with a first cluster of existing and new artworks by Kasper Bosmans, Toshie Takeuchi and Yu Honglei, which situate the program’s enquiry within the domestic 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 and human identity; Bosmans’ new miniature paintings and sand carpets trace the use of folkloric imagery in 18th-century kitchens and annotate his conversations with the curator on the material manifestations of hospitality and support.

Over the course of three months, the exhibition gradually takes shape through an ongoing event program of artist-devised tours, chocolate readings, post-hypnosis and zoological lectures, where artworks function as prompts for—or evidence of—these gatherings.  Traversing the various circumstances where the host-guest status quo is stretched and ruptured, Des hôtes creates a web of relations that magnifies the realities of how we receive and relate to one another.