Colonial hospitality: rethinking curatorial and artistic responsibility

The recent enthusiasm for gestures of hospitality in contemporary art promises relief from the individualising forces of neoliberal capitalism and the professionalised hierarchies of the art world. Yet, Jacques Derrida describes the gesture of hospitality as paradoxically asserting a kind of sovereignty that underwrites the 'right to host', returning hospitality to the conditionality of the authorising institution. In settler-colonial territories, these institutionally underwritten gestures always sit uneasily atop indigenous sovereignties that have not been ceded, requiring the positive gestures of hospitality to remain open to their structuring fissures. This paper considers figurations of hospitality and responsibility in works by Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Raqs Media Collective in reading the art collective Local Time’s research-driven practice that seeks to reconcile indigenous self-determination and settler gestures of hospitality.