Hotel Theory Reader is the fourth volume in Fillip’s Folio Series, a publication line devoted to writing by critics, artists, and curators on recurring questions in contemporary art.

Edited by Ruth Estévez and Sohrab Mohebbi, the book explores the proposition of theory not simply as a critical tool, but as a form with its own aesthetic and rhetorical force. In that sense, it approaches theory as something that can be staged, voiced, and composed, rather than only applied.

Bringing together texts by David Antin, Art & Language, Ruth Estévez, Bruce Hainley, Wayne Koestenbaum, Chris Kraus, Snejanka Mihaylova, Sohrab Mohebbi, Cally Spooner, V-Girls, Danna Vajda, and Tirdad Zolghadr, the volume assembles a polyphonic field of positions rather than a single argument. What emerges is a reader that treats theoretical writing as performative, unstable, and open-ended, moving between criticism, artistic language, and speculative reflection.

The book developed out of ideas first tested in the exhibition Hotel Theory and extends that inquiry into publication form. Rather than documenting a project from a distance, it carries its central question forward: what happens when theory is understood not as commentary on art, but as an artistic mode of production in its own right.