The Hotel Show

Hotels are silent archives of a perpetual transience: stories, touches, encounters are constantly rewritten, erased, rewritten, erased. You are no more than the name on a card until it is overwritten by another. „The Hotel Show" at the Pearl Hotel Frankfurt am Main brings together the works of artists Rashiyah Elanga, Yun Heo, Line Lyhne, Nadia Perlov, Arthur Stachurski and Ian Waelder. As different as their artistic positions are, the interplay shows how they each invite the viewer in their own way into alternative, partly imaginary realities and propose counter-designs to the generic environment of a hotel. Rashiyah Elanga uses fiction as a tool to develop emancipatory spaces. She gives discriminated people the potential to change their situation and negotiates the possibilities of new realities. In a humorous narrative, artist Yun Heo decentres people by allowing her key sculptures to become subjects acting on their own authority. They free themselves and only in this way can tell their own story. Line Lyhne's laser papercut creates a surreal visual world with only a few means, which, like other works by her, also questions the perspectives and the viewing habits of the viewer. Architecture and urban planning are rarely neutral, as artist Nadia Perlov shows in her series Bugs and Bags. In sumptuous compositions, she deconstructs the political and cultural implications of architecture. Arthur Stachurski creates imaginary worlds in his works that move between utopia, dystopia, and digital parallel worlds. His painterly techniques simultaneously raise questions of the medium's production process per se. Ian Waelder invites us into the micro-level of daily life with his series Here not today: a newspaper from the city he is currently in and the food scraps found on it become a snapshot of a day, a kind of diary entry by the artist. In „The Hotel Show“, the artists take us into their personal stories, critically question the socio-political and cultural attitudes of society, and create imaginary worlds in which escapes or evasions can be imagined. The Hotel Show was initiated, organized and curated by Alke Heykes, Sarah Müller, Seda Pesen and Anna-Lisa Scherfose and kindly supported by the Kulturamt Frankfurt.