OMAHA, NE.- Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts presents I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality, a group exhibition exploring corporeal hospitality, from December 9, 2021 through March 20, 2022. Hospitality is usually considered a philosophical concept with juridical implications, an ethical concern or a social/political practice. This exhibition shifts the focus to consider the stealth work of hospitality on our material and political understanding of bodies.

I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality invites visitors to consider how hospitality has simultaneously circumscribed what we think bodies are, what we imagine they can do, how we feel they relate, whom we believe they can encounter, and ultimately, how they engage with each other and in the world. The exhibition explores these questions in space by weaving together open-ended experiential connections between works in a range of media, from painting, sculpture, textile, installation and performance to lens- and time-based practices. These works explore several questions, including pregnancy and surrogacy; transplantation, implantation and transfusion; neural adaptation and the phantom limb; bacteria and the microbiome; viruses, parasites, symbionts and holobionts; stem cells; mechanical and chemical prosthetics; architectures and protocols of corporeal hospitality; dreams and dreamwork; and the “miraculous” work of relics, spirits and energies. In the process, the exhibition reveals a storied genealogy that points to the extractive intersection of race, gender, class, religion and value. I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality critically excavates this legacy and offers up an expanded theater of operations.

I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality features unexpected and productive juxtapositions of new and recent works by Ingrid Bachmann, Crystal Z Campbell, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, Stephanie Dinkins, Celina Eceiza, Adham Faramawy, Mounir Fatmi, Flis Holland, Oliver Husain & Kerstin Schroedinger, Rodney McMillian, Bridget Moser, Pedro Neves Marques, Berenice Olmedo, Jenna Sutela, Ana Torfs and Francis Upritchard. This exhibition includes artists showing together for the first time and introduces the work of several of them to U.S. audiences. I don’t know you like that: The Bodywork of Hospitality is organized by Sylvie Fortin, Bemis Center 2019-2021 Curator-in-Residence, as part of her ongoing, broader research into the currencies of hospitality.

“When I began talking about this project in 2018, I would often have to flesh out what I meant by corporeal hospitality. If anything, post- and transhumanism would be brought up," said Fortin. "COVID-19 changed all that, becoming an instant, and often the sole reference. Suddenly, the exhibition seemed very prescient. In the end, the exhibition’s artists lead us, through their work, to an exploration of corporeal hospitality that dissolves the borders between the living and non-living, human and more-than-human in myriad of ways.”