Sylvie Fortin will present a lecture at the LSU School of Art at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, November 8, 2017, in the LSU Design Building Auditorium (room 103).

Fortin is a curator, critic, and editor based in Montréal and New York. Her critical essays and reviews have been published in numerous catalogs, anthologies, and periodicals, including Artforum International, Art Press, C Magazine, Flash Art, Fuse, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Parachute. Fortin has received many grants from the Canada Council for the Arts for her work as an independent curator and writer. In addition, her research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program.

In her lecture, “Of Hosts and Ghosts: Contemporary Art, Curating & Indebtedness,” Fortin will discuss her current curatorial research project into the contemporary currency of hospitality. The project seeks to open up a space to think through some crucial artistic, social, and political questions that have so far been foreclosed by both aesthetic theory and the narratives developed to understand and discuss political events.

Learning and questioning how the concept of hospitality operates in other fields, including literature, theater, political theory, and the law, theology, economy, mathematics, biology, chemistry, medicine, engineering, and more, the project seeks to update our conceptual framework to pose pressing political questions of contemporary artistic practice. How does hospitality operate in the studio and other spaces of production? How might we theorize the hospitality of the artwork? How might the curator’s research and performance stage hospitality? What if criticism were premised on hospitality? What would it mean for institutions to become hospitable?