Bringing together artwork, archival material and architectural research from across the Global South, “Guest Relations” examines the historical, political, social and cultural transformations accompanying processes of intense touristification. The exhibition emerges out of, and responds to, the context of Dubai—one of the fastest-growing tourism destinations in the world. Part of a broader strategy to ensure continued prosperity beyond fossil fuels, the city’s model for urban development—driven by significant state and private investment in the hospitality industry—has been widely emulated. “Guest Relations” foregrounds social complexities and narrative possibilities beyond projections of luxury and spectacle, elucidating the cultural and historical contours of what we might call the “work of welcome.”
Focused on the transactional nature of modern hospitality, the exhibition centres the hotel as a historical subject and a site of artistic investigation, while touching on other key sites of the hospitality industry such as airlines, cruise ships, amusement parks and social media platforms. Hotels are spaces of temporary residence, providing visitors with the comfort and security of home in faraway lands.
They are enclaves where complex relations and negotiations between guest and host play out. Through the second half of the 20th century, hotels across the Gulf were engines of modernisation and treasured icons of modernity. Vital, if exclusive, communal hubs, they provided rare opportunities for leisure, consumption and entertainment. They became magical portals to a cosmopolitan elsewhere, zones of exception where, under the guise of tourism, practices outside social norms were permitted.
Tracing the hotel’s history, from colonial hubris and grandeur to its ubiquity in the age of globalisation, “Guest Relations” narrates histories of nationalism, modernity and war, and their intersections with labour and class, through the material and immaterial infrastructures of hospitality. The exhibition unfolds through galleries inspired by different spatial features common to hotels—the building, the lobby, the room and the corridor. The journey concludes by offering hotels and the hospitality industry as prompts for the imagination, for telling stories and narrating histories, for revisiting pasts and reimagining futures.
at Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai
until April 28, 2024