Until 28 April 2024, Jameel Arts Centre is holding Guest Relations, a collective show displaying diverse artworks by 34 creatives from the Global South that delve into the nature of modern commercial hospitality and historical, political, social, and cultural transformations of tourism. Curated by Murtaza Vali and Lucas Morin, the exhibition offers a nuanced exploration, with a particular focus on Dubai, a prominent hub of global tourism.
Guest Relations reimagines the hotel as a site for artistic investigation while also examining other main sites of the hospitality industry: airlines, cruise ships, amusement parks, and social media platforms. Tracing the hotel’s history, the show unveils the intertwined histories of nationalism, modernity, war, labour, and class.
The exhibition is divided into several galleries inspired by the architectural structure and layout of a hotel building: the building, the lobby, the room, the corridor, and the portal. Each section invites visitors to engage with the concept of hospitality as a canvas for telling stories and narrating histories, for revisiting pasts and envisioning futures.
The first gallery addresses the luxury hotel as an architectural icon and its relation to city branding. Among elevation drawings and tabletop scale models on view is Castillos de Arena (Sandcastles) Caribe Hilton (2020) by Yiyo Tirado Rivera. It is a sand model of a hotel which symbolises American colonialism’s impact on the local ecology.
The second gallery examines the stagecraft of hospitality, featuring, for instance, the Hotel Le Royal (1994) art piece by Svay Ken. This painting depicting waiters serving hotel guests provides a study of wealth and class inequality in a culinary context. Lamya Gargash’s photos of one-star hotels in Dubai, which are also on display, reflect on the racialised labour sustaining the industry.
The subsequent sections centre on the hotel room, the corridor, and the portal. The exhibits include The Hotel, Room 44 (1981–83) by Sophie Calle which she produced while working as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel. There, she rummaged through guests’ personal belongings and documented them. The resulting photos give the hotel workers the intrusive presence and agency and offer up a prospect in which providers of hospitality and those receiving it are engaged in a battle of who is surveilling whom.
The highlights of the exhibition include two artworks portraying hotels as sites of terror and espionage, where both the guests and the hosts are in a state of mutual suspicion and paranoia. Double-Sided Mirrors (2023) by Ala Younis incorporates a chandelier found in Baghdad’s Al Rasheed Hotel, infamous for alleged espionage activities in the 1990s. Sung Tieu is represented by his Moving Target Shadow Detection (2022), an unsettling video addressing surveillance in the Hotel Nacional de Cuba and the Havana Syndrome.
To learn more about Guest Relations, please visit the official web page of the show.
You might also be interested in attending Toy World by Farah Al Qasimi and At the Edge of Land at Hayy Jameel.
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