Sylvie Fortin, 2019–2021 Curator-in-Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts & juror for the 35th Undergraduate Exhibition, curated an exhibition at the Bemis titled "I Don’t Know You Like That: The Bodywork of Hospitality." Sylvie will be giving private tours of this exhibition. There are also a number of lectures that will be happening over the next couple months, including one with Ash Smith, Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts.
PRIVATE TOURS OF THE EXHIBITION I DON’T KNOW YOU LIKE THAT: THE BODYWORK OF HOSPITALITY
Sylvie will be available for private tours with classes, students or other groups on the following dates. Please email Sylvie directly to book a tour or for inquiries:
- February 22-March 11
- March 17-20
There are also many events, which may be of interest to art and art history students.
ART HISTORIAN LECTURE
- Lecture Series | Irina Aristarkhova, Technics of Self-Welcome in Contemporary Art
Respondent: Dr. Kristin Girten
March 10, 7–8:30 PM, in person at Bemis Center (The lecture will also stream live at twitch.tv/bemiscenter and facebook.com/bemiscenter.)
RSVP required at bemiscenter.org/events. NOTE: Not yet open for registration.
A student of mine once said, “Mother is like a fridge. You go there and open the door when you need something.” For their final project, the students in their class created a prototype of a future parent, a combination of hardware (objects, robots, bodies, and personal assistants like Alexa) and software (all kinds of soft things, including a soft-voiced “What would you like, dear?,” a smile, and a waiting pause of attentive listening). This student’s remark was telling in its imaginative succinctness. Various traditions and philosophies of hospitality reveal a similar sentiment: they posit a fundamental link between the mother, the cultural sense of porousness, and collective ownership of the maternal mind/body.
In this lecture, Aristarkhova engages with the works in I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality, especially Stephanie Dinkins’s Bina48, to propose the idea of “self-welcome.” That is, in addition to redefining our cultural traditions to provide hospitality—with its rights and privileges—to previously unwelcomed groups, Aristarkhova presents self-welcome as a generative framework of possibilities for thought and action. She develops self-welcome as an idea and practice of establishing new boundaries and creating new configurations of the self under changing cultural conditions. Where does the self end? Where does the non-self begin? Where does an object end? Where does its environment begin?
Dr. Irina Aristarkhova is an Associate Professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she also teaches at the Digital Studies Institute. She is the author of Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Hospitality of the Matrix: Philosophy, Biomedicine, and Culture (Columbia University Press, 2012).
ARTIST TALKS
- Artist Talk: Crystal Z Campbell and Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger
February 15, 12–1 PM CT, on Zoom
Artists’ bios and RSVP required at bemiscenter.org/events.
Join us for the second of a series of online artist talks as Crystal Z Campbell and the duo Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger discuss their work on view in I don’t know you like that in the context of their wider research-based practice. This conversation centers on artistic inquiries into select medical experiments from the second half of the 20th century–namely, the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks’s immortal cells and the transversal use of the chemical compound DNCB in photography and early AIDS care–and their contemporary legacies. Carried out by professional researchers and citizen scientists, these endeavors variously mobilized hospitality in their approach to care and cure.
- Artist Talk: Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Jenna Sutela, moderated by Ash Eliza Smith
February 22, 10–11:00 AM CT, on Zoom
Artists’ bios and RSVP required at bemiscenter.org/events.
Join us for the third of a series of online artist talks accompanying I don’t know you like that: a unique opportunity to meet some of the exhibiting artists, learn more about their work, and ask your questions. This talk will center on the relationship between biotechnology, artistic research, and storytelling as Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Jenna Sutela discuss their imaginative moving-image works on view while taking us into their broader research-based practice. Enlisting specific narrative genres–respectively, the epistolary and the essay–these works weave theory and matter to ponder the intersection between hospitality and biopolitics, critically examining the ways in which biotechnology is reconfiguring the contemporary body, kinship, and society.