HOSPITALITY

Tuberculosis (TB) is a curable disease, yet it remains the world’s deadliest infectious illness, claiming around 4,000 lives every day. Despite international commitments to end TB by 2030, scientific progress remains insufficient and funding inadequate. At the same time, stigma continues to force millions of people worldwide to hide their diagnosis.

Hospitality is a new exhibition by artist and TB survivor Paulina Siniatkina that addresses this often overlooked social dimension of the disease. Through an immersive and deeply personal artistic language, the exhibition explores what it means to live and survive within closed medical institutions.

Siniatkina spent seven months in hospital isolation. In her work, she reflects on how people in such environments learn to survive not only medically, but also emotionally and socially. Wherever you are, it is important to feel at home, she recalls. In the TB ward where she was treated, friendships and relationships emerged, sometimes also with medical staff. Patients slipped through holes in fences to walk in the park or have a drink at the shopping moll. Intrigues and romances in the wards, laughters mixed with despair and loneliness, always on the edge of conflicting feelings. The hospital became a parallel world, a miniature society governed by its own rules.

These experiences are translated in Hospitality into a spatial and material installation. By reimagining hospital interiors and domesticating medical equipment, the exhibition creates a universe at the boundary between the unnerving and the familiar, where drop counters become personalities or plants grow from test tube racks. Medical objects lose their authority and become vulnerable, intimate, and human. What is usually associated with fear and exclusion becomes inhabitable.

The exhibition explicitly addresses tuberculosis-related stigma, which varies across cultures but has devastating consequences everywhere. In some regions, TB is associated with poverty, imprisonment, addiction, or homelessness; elsewhere, women who have had TB are considered unfit for marriage or motherhood. Many survivors erase the experience from their lives, while others face rejection by family members, loss of work, or housing insecurity. Meanwhile, in much of the Western world, TB is widely perceived as a disease of the past. As a result of these misconceptions, nearly four million people worldwide are overlooked by healthcare systems every year, and many die needlessly from a curable disease, even in modern Western countries.

Untitled.pagesAgainst this backdrop, Hospitality proposes art as a space for reflection, encounter and dialogue. The project brings together TB survivors, their relatives, healthcare professionals, scientists, and policymakers, opening conversations often avoided in clinical or political contexts. The exhibition asks how care can be reimagined, how stigma can be sustainably dismantled, and how new ways of coping with trauma may emerge.