'There is no evidence that the words guest and host are etymologically connected with the word ghost. While guests and hosts are graspable beings whose relation constitutes the problem of hospitality, ghosts are ambivalent figures. The ghost is present somewhere between me and you. It is a familiar-other who embodies the tension between the personal and the collective. The ghost is a performer who possesses a strange, timeless authority. The public is transfixed in awaiting its speech. The ghost is a host that teaches the social imaginary and gives advice on how to live. The ghost is a guest whose hosting is a risky endeavor. It remembers things that nobody else remembers and it might want to say them forever.
Ghosts are also known to be invisible, although many believe that they manifest in things. Things on the other hand, despite being material, often remain unnoticed themselves. Think about public statues. We pass next to them on the street, in the library, or at the university, in a museum, sometimes they are even part of the building that we live or work in. But unless they are contested, busts, monuments and other public sculptures done at one time for posterity remain unseen in our contemporary everyday life. Such an invisibility can have its advantages, of course. While being invisible, a ghost can sit and watch the life of others and thrill to it, without them knowing that it is there, until one gives them attention by f.ex. talking to them like Thomas Geiger in his performance series Bust Talks. There is, however, no evidence that ghosts live in public.
Thomas Geiger‘s Bust Talks are in a way contemporary séances that follow the decorum of a talk show. With the interview being his tool, Geiger investigates what the present might have in common with the past by questioning its witnesses. He treats objects as subjects and gives them attention that they otherwise would not receive. The protagonists in Bust Talks are not always angels; their study provides a lesson in confronting contradictions and looking at history from different perspectives. In specific episodes, the show is about how to talk to someone with whom you disagree – with Dr. Hans Klöpfer, understanding otherness and belonging – with Kifwebe, providing a stage for a reinterpretation of herstory - with Mutter, imagining better futures - with Friedrich Wilhelm Raiffeisen, and revising ideas about the freedom of art and its usefulness - with Ludwig van Beethoven. Performance becomes here a stage for debate and discourse and a hospitable situation in which everybody can see and hear from different positions. Above all, Bust Talks make clear that if there is something that a guest, a ghost and a host have in common, it is how they all play into the process of the renegotiation of identity.
It is common knowledge that hospitality can take different directions and lead to different results. At its best, the act of hospitality is about self-othering, it is a counterforce to narcissism, and a process resulting in mutual recognition, that might lead to a transformation of the self. At its worst, however, hospitality is relation of power, a game of separating oneself from the other in multiple ways. It can manifest in an exertion of control over the guest out of fear about the loss of one’s power and identity. In practice the positions of guests and hosts constantly fluctuate. A guest can turn into a host, or into a ghost, who can once again turn into either guest or host, and again, forevermore.'
Mirela Baciak
Thomas Geiger:
Born in Germany in 1983, Thomas Geiger is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vienna. Using performance, sculpture and language his works create fragmentary stages and playful situations mediating between public, private and institutional spaces. He has a specific interest in giving voice to the past to unfold a new impact on the presence, such his performance series Bust Talks, in which he has conversation with busts or the Festival of Minimal Action, where he repeats existing performances by other artists. His oeuvre straddles the interface of public and private/institutional spaces, and it is in this zone that Geiger creates points of contact with diferent forms of what is public. In recent years, he has realised solo projects with Wiener Festwochen (2020), steirischer herbst (2019&20) Ausstellungsraum Klingental, Basel (2020), Kunsthalle Wien (2020), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Chile (2019), Kunstverein Langenhagen (2019), Simultanhalle, Cologne (2019), Museum Tinguely, Basel (2018), Despacio, San José (2018); Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris, (2017), beursschouwburg, Brussels (2015). Currently, he is producing new works with Biennale für Freiburg and Landesausstellung Oberösterreich.
