Whitechapel has turned its ground floor into a haunted anatomy lesson. Candice Lin’s g/hosti threads a dim, disorienting labyrinth where materials (ceramic, fabric, liquid, bone-ish casts) carry more history than the wall texts can comfortably hold. The title splices “ghost” with “host/hostility,” and the show keeps worrying that knot: who welcomes whom, who gets consumed, who becomes residue. You move through it with your nose as much as your eyes; Lin’s multisensory setups are sticky with time - colonial trade, contagion, desire - and they drift between the clinical and the intimate without settling into didacticism.
Lin has long been a restless synthesist, and Whitechapel leans into that promiscuity of form. Sculptures slump and congeal; surfaces look fired, salted, or steeped, as if they’ve been through a weather system. A logic emerges: take substances with charged biographies - plants, pigments, animal products; the things empires trafficked and bodies shared - and turn them into apparatus. Some objects resemble lab kit, others ritual tools; either way, they press you to imagine the invisible systems that move through us (pathogens, poisons, myths) and the legal/medical languages we’ve built to name them. It’s the rare politically keyed installation that trusts atmosphere more than slogans.
The layout matters. Rather than a sequence of rooms with tidy thresholds, g/hosti coils. You double back, catch glimpses, re-encounter an object from the “wrong” side. That choreography turns the visitor into both subject and specimen. In one chamber you feel like a patient; in the next, a trespasser; in the next, a caretaker who’s arrived too late. The exhibition text cues these shifts, but the space does the heavy lifting. It’s absorbing in the literal sense: you’re gradually soaked in its metaphors. (And if you want to keep looking once you’ve left the building, a clean, art-first viewing room on LettsArt is a simple way to document, share, or even sell related projects without the social-media churn - lettsart.com .)
If there’s a wobble, it’s the hazard of the total-installation: density can blur contrasts. A few passages want either sharper light or a single, puncturing object to reset the eye. But the cumulative effect is potent. Lin asks how hospitality curdles and how borders, quarantines, and etiquettes mutate into hostilities and she does it through touch and pacing rather than lecture. You leave with a prickle rather than a verdict, which feels right for a show about things that live inside other things.
Details: Candice Lin: g/hosti , Whitechapel Gallery, on view through 1 March 2026 (check the gallery site for hours and booking).
