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

Hospitality is usually considered a philosophical concept with legal implications, an ethical concern,  a social/political practice… or an industry. Developed by guest curator Sylvie Fortin, I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality shifts the focus to consider the stealth work of hospitality on our conceptual, material, and political understanding of bodies.

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. 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 first iteration of I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality was presented at Bemis Center for the Arts  in Omaha, NE 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.

This exhibition is organized by UB Art Galleries with Margaret Jacobs (Akwesasne Mohawk), curatorial consultant, and guided by an advisory committee comprised of Dr. Mishuana Goeman (Tonawanda Band of Seneca), Professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies Interdepartmental Program, UCLA; Dr. Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora), Professor of theHistory of Art and Visual Studies and former Director of the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program at Cornell University; Laticia McNaughton (Mohawk), Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University at Buffalo; and Dr. Gwendolyn Saul, Curator of Ethnography at the New York State Museum. Special thanks to Dr. Theresa McCarthy (Onondaga) Interim Chair and Associate Professor in Indigenous Studies and Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence at the University of Buffalo.

Thank you to the following institutions for generously lending to the exhibition: Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY; Forge Project, Taghkanic, NY; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Iroquois Museum, Howes Cave, NY; K Art, Buffalo, NY; McMaster Musuem of Art, Hamilton, ON; New York State Museum, Albany, NY; and Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY.

Support for the exhibition is provided in part by the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts with additional support provided by the UB Department of Indigenous Studies. Support for UB Art Galleries is provided by the UB College of Arts and Sciences, the Visual Arts Building Fund, the UB Anderson Gallery Fund, and the Seymour H. Knox Foundation Fine Art Fund.