Host: Amanda Beech/Jaspar Joseph-Lester
Transmission: Host
Transmission: Host is a series of chapbooks derived from an annual lecture series organised by Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Each week a different artist invites a guest speaker. The host selects, presents, and looks after his or her guest. A critical engagement between host and guest is assumed; what exactly that relationship is will be made evident through discussion. There is an ethics of hospitality, of making the stranger welcome. A host has a standard of conduct, and historically, hospitality has been seen as a code, a duty, a virtue, and a law. There is a bond between host and guest, and in the lecture series and the subsequent chapbooks, this bond is formed by the engagement in and the practice of art.
Amanda Beech makes artworks, writes, and collaborates on curatorial projects. Her work explores the relation between democracy and violence in neo-liberalism by scrutinising the forceful rhetoric in narratives of freedom, which play out in philosophy, politics, literature, and popular culture. Constructing narratives that take in particular biographies, sites, social mythologies and mixing them with the bounds of philosophical inquiry, her work operates as a space of seductive power, will and force – a world that emphasises decisiveness as its guiding principle and that deals with our share in it.