Be my Guest

For more than 50 years, Hilton hotels have been the epitome of a distinguished Western lifestyle. Hiltons can be found virtually all over the world: in America and Asia, in Europe and Africa. The image of these hotels is marked by largely standardized components. Each guest knows what to expect from a Hilton, no matter where in the world he or she is. And yet, the geographical, cultural and social specifics of the respective site are never fully eliminated.
BE MY GUEST consists of photographs and interviews recorded in the Hilton Vienna and the Hilton Colombo and investigates the relationship between seemingly familiar spatial structures and standardized services, and local characteristics or cultural differences. Views from windows, pictures on walls and an array of objects in the hotels function as specific stagings of geographic and cultural difference, but at the same time coincide with inevitable or unintentional details that give us clues on whether we are in the hotel in Austria or Sri Lanka.
Employees of this type of hotel chain usually remain anonymous. It is part of their job to maintain the international standard and so, when interacting with guests, they become a direct part of the staging oscillating between familiarity and specificity. Their statements, which reflect their highly diverse cultural and economic backgrounds, are entwined on a multitude of levels with the fractured architectural and visual representations of international modernity.