Hotel Kyjev is a site-specific interrogation inviting artists, theorists, and guests from other fields from Switzerland, Slovakia, Germany and the US to interrogate notions of End/Ending. What or when is an end, how can we prove it? What is the agency of the artist, the theorist or the un/productive civilian with regard to ending? Is there something like a "normal" end in a phenomenological, socio-cultural or historic sense, and what is its relationship to time? How can we talk about the experience of ending, the will to end, or the opposite to sustain?
Hotel Kyjev will focus on issues of end and time as a means of exposing different cultural and artistic visions regarding the complex and divers forms of modernization projects beyond the traditional hegemonic vision of the West-West. Hotel Kyjev suggests aspiration and optimism; it’s a kind of realizable utopia.
This project is located at the Hotel Kyjev in the centre of Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. All events will take place in the Hotel Kyjev amenities and be open to the public, unless otherwise demanded by the participants. Half a year ago the hotel was meant to be torn down in Fall 2007, today protest against this act is vivid and powerful. Hotel Kyjev is a site of complexity where histories and stories mysteriously overlay. www.kyjev-hotel.sk
Time goes unrecognized for the most part. It only gains physicality in a moment of collapse or crisis. When we don’t have enough or too much of it at hand; or when what seemed to be here to stay becomes threatened to end. One could say that these moments bear a complexity of pleasure and pain, are beyond language or ask for a perverse abundance of it.
Hotel Kyjev is towering in the center of Bratislava. Suffocated by the neighboring TESCO giant as well as an ever-growing throng of shops and amenities, the hotel looks grey and fragile. Built in 1973 during communism, the building symbolized the idea of Western glamour with some areas accessible for designated people only, some open to the public. Today, Hotel Kyjev resembles a grandiloquent waiting hall sheltering a melting pot of visitors: tourists from the West are brunching next to businessmen from the East holding their meetings; and while politicians are buttering up the elderly in the conference room upstairs, the jobless youngsters brawl downstairs in the café hall. Layers of an ambiguous past, a pressing presence and longed-for future counter impose in a vague barrenness. These moments of collapse or dissonance shall be intervened and scrutinized, phantasized about and be laid open by a carefully selected international group of artists and theorists, as well as scientists in dialog and production.