State of Integration: On hostility and hospitality

About

On hostility and hospitality is guest curated by curator Galit Eilat and artist and architect Sandi Hilal. The exhibition examines the relation between hospitality and hostility and is based on Hilal’s art project The Hospitality Room: the right to be host and be hosted (2016–) created for an asylum center in Boden, Sweden.

‘The hospitality room’ refers to the room of in Arab culture, which is used only to receive guests and is always ready. During her research among Syrian refugees, Hilal found that even in the smallest asylum center room, unexpected guests are welcomed. Hosting is a way to break with the feeling of being a guest/unwanted/isolated and to connect one's lost life in Syria with the new life in Sweden.

As their contribution to CAMP, Eilat and Hilal will establish a number of hospitality rooms around Copenhagen that will make us reflect deeper on the host-guest relation. In these spaces, artists, refugees, cultural anthropologists, and lawyers will reach out to local audiences and introduce them to questions about sovereignty and the boundaries for hospitality. Each hospitality room is an exhibition in the exhibition and makes up the setting for a seminar on different legal aspects of displacement, migration, and asylum. The seminars will result in a legal theater in CAMP that uses the method of ‘Legislative Theater’ to facilitate new understandings of sovereignty, boundaries for hospitality, and citizenship.