Hilary Galbreaith – Be Our Guest, 2024

Combining video, drawing, writing and performance, Hilary Galbreaith creates fictional worlds in a quest for strange and comic forms. In installations that often include music, the artist tackles issues facing contemporary society. Carried along by the lightness of a colourful, makeshift aesthetic, Hilary Galbreaith exposes the limits of power structures by subverting them with humour and the ludicrous.

Be Our Guest confronts the difficult realities of the hospitality industry, where working conditions — the hours, the pay system, occasionally violent altercations with customers who are “always right”, and so on — are beginning to conform to the American business model. The artist plunges visitors into an atmosphere that is intimate yet standardised; it is accompanied by a sort of muzak sound track, the kind of music associated with hotel lifts and lounges. On the wall, Hilary Galbreaith has drawn the evolution of the notion of hospitality, while on the floor there are anonymous accounts collected by the artist from waiters, waitresses and receptionists. Some are students, some are professionals, working from choice or necessity; they all paint the picture of an environment conflicted between structures of control and a genuine commitment to service.