In 2017, eight artists – (Julie Conrad (design), Adolf El Assal (film), Guy Helminger (literature), Karolina Markiewicz and Pascal Piron (visual arts), Simone Mousset (dance), Patrick Muller (music), Renelde Pierlot (theatre) – were selected and commissioned to create work for the Luxembourg Pavilion at EXPO 2020 DUBAI. How to Host a Ghost is one of the six resulting projects, a collaboration with actress and theatre maker Renelde Pierlot.

How to Host a Ghost is a multi-layered project, lab, and discussion forum that deals metaphorically with ghosts and haunted places. Considering the World Expo as a ghost town, unsuitable as a living environment for human beings, How to Host a Ghost invites a ghost to inhabit the Luxembourg Pavilion. A ghost that questions the impact of the World Expo, and that constantly reminds us of repressed or silenced concerns.

The project consists of the Ghostcatcher, a darkly entangled sculpture-monument exhibited in the Art Space, of Hunting and Haunting, a nocturnal residency-laboratory for seven performance artists, and of There’s Someone Jumping Off the Roof of the Pavilion, a collaborative artistic archive of the project edited by Tara Fatehi Irani.

As part of the creation of the Ghostcatcher, six artists from Luxembourg, Croatia, Russia, Lebanon, Iran, and Dubai have been commissioned to reflect on socio-political ghosts and all things hidden away and silenced in their own surroundings, and to create visual artworks that reflect their thoughts. Every night from 17-23 January, as a part of the residency Hunting and Haunting, seven performance artists have haunted the pavilion and deconstructed these specially commissioned artworks, integrating them into the Ghostcatcher as a violent and constantly growing web of knotted, discoloured and ripped entrails.

In doing so, they mark a brutal presence for their questions about the relevance and ethics of the Expo and in particular of creating contemporary art for that event.

Hunting and Haunting artists: Catherine Elsen (Luxembourg), Malika Fankha (Switzerland), Tara Fatehi Irani (Iran/UK), Anna Khlestkina (Russia), Simone Mousset (Luxembourg), Alicja Nauman (Poland), Renelde Pierlot (Luxembourg), Valerie Reding (Luxembourg)

Ghostcatcher artists: Sasha Abela (Lebanon), Sawsan Al Bahar (UAE), Katerina Andreeva (Russia), Laurie Lamborelle (Luxembourg), Sonja Obradovic (Croatia), Somayeh Pakar (Iran)