INDEX: Host

Host is a large-scale curtain installation. An artwork and an exhibition architecture, it hosts a film program about migration and climate change, organized by artist Céline Condorelli (b. France, 1974). 

The title of this installation names what it does: it hosts. This function usually belongs to the art institution as the host of artists, artworks, and audiences. Host changes the existing institutional and spatial conditions by presenting itself as a host, while also being a guest. Conventionally a presentation device, Condorelli’s curtain is both part of the display and on display.

For INDEX, Host will present a film program that combines documentaries, artists’ videos, and feature-length films dealing with the consequences for people, animals, and landscape alike of living in a dangerously warmer world. The screened films offer past and present-day observations of industrial and traditional farming and fishing methods, the depiction of global capitalism’s philosophy of extraction, the challenges of waste processing and pollution, and portraits of migrants across the world. Avoiding catastrophic, apocalyptic discourses by instead offering poetic and compelling visions of our time, these films appeal to individual and collective transformation for a more compassionate world.

Sections of the film program were developed with Filipa Ramos for Cinema Zagara, part of Geometries, a project curated by Locus Athens.

Host is organized by Ruth Estévez, Senior Curator-at-Large.

Host is the second iteration of INDEX. Housed in the Lee Gallery, biannual projects by INDEX artists will produce site-responsive and participatory platforms and programs. Like a book’s index, the project serves not only to list but also to reorganize, cross-reference, and establish new relationships to content. INDEX at the Lee Gallery is a place where people and ideas merge in a collective manner.