Reading Group with Curator Jacqueline Mabey: “Step of Hospitality / No Hospitality” from Of Hospitality by Jacques Derrida 

Terri Smith

April 28, 3:30 PM–5:00 PM

Join “In this place where the guest rests” curator Jacqueline Mabey for a free, public reading group of Jacques Derrida “Step of Hospitality / No Hospitality,” from Of Hospitality. This is a casual group that meets at the Franklin Street Works’ cozy cafe on February 24 from 3:30 – 5:00 pm. The group will discuss the text, unpacking it and using it as a lens to consider the exhibition. PLEASE RSVP FOR THIS EVENT HERE

The works gathered together in “In this place where the guest rests” tackle the pressing issues of nation, place, home, and belonging in a moment of crisis as more people are displaced than any time since World War II.  “In this place where the guest rests” presents works that touch upon vehicles of displacement — war, economics, colonialism and settler colonialism, white supremacy — and what is left in their wake. The works of Ken Gonzales Day, Brendan Fernandes and Jumana Manna allude to memory and its representation, histories that are told, and who has the right to tell them. Yael Bartana and Tanya Lukin Linklater’s works suggest the temporality of displacement as being simultaneously of the past and the future. Christina Battle and Sherry Millner appropriate images from visual culture to throw the realities of displaced people and hegemonic power into stark relief. Works by Addie Wagenknecht and Daniel R. Small touch on economic displacement on personal and global scales.

Jacqueline Mabey’s work is shaped by studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, McGill University and The University of British Columbia and by multifarious professional experience in commercial galleries, museums and artist studios. Mabey is a co-founder of Art+Feminism, an international, activist curatorial platform based out of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, with satellites at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate, London; Banff Center for the Arts; MAXXI, Rome; Archives nationales de France, Paris; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; MoCA Detroit, amongst many others. They have curated the work of artists including Yael Bartana, Hannah Black, Kate Gilmore, Brendan Fernandes, Ken Gonzales-Day, Jen Liu, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Jumana Manna, Divya Mehra, Lorraine O’Grady, and Addie Wagenknecht, and spoken about their work at venues such as Cornell University, The New School, Printed Matter, and Columbia University. They were named a Leading Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine and a Badass Woman by Buzzfeed. Mabey works independently under the honorific, failed projects. They were born in New Jersey, raised in Nova Scotia, and currently live with a small dog by a large park in Brooklyn. Click here to learn more about Mabey’s work.