Abstract
In my research I explore the site of mouth as the tongue’s resting place, turning to the metonymy of tongue and its performative and linguistic meanings to address issues of (South Asian) cultural identity: performance through speech, taste, and sexuality. The tongue metonymy, I argue, helps to focus discussions of hospitality around the migrant’s body, politics of identity, and place in a globalized world. I further examine definitions of hospitable spaces, using the mouth as example: it is where introductions of foreign objects take place. The image of the open mouth with tongue on display troubles ideas of intimacy and disgust or raw interiority against a polished exterior. The liminal and transient framing of the mouth as a site of negotiation of power and the encounter of possible (in)hospitality between the local/insider and the foreigner/outsider is a central setting in my project. To illustrate these connections, I analyze the work of contemporary artists, Bani Abidi and Mithu Sen who contribute to the discourse on hospitality and its limitations through a wide body of work on the subject. Sen repeatedly returns to the image of the mouth, its interiority, and visceral drawings/sculptures of tongue in her seminal works, To have and to hold (2002) and Border unseen (2014). In my paper, I read these and other performance works as troubling binaries of East/West, host/guest, public/private and colonizer/colonized.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2025 Special Focus—The Art of Hospitality
KEYWORDS
Performance, Body, Migrant, Border, Hospitality, Site, Public-Private
