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ART FOR HOTELS BOOK
There is an ever-growing group of people whose lives transcend national borders. They spend their time in the airports, cars, train stations, motels, and hotels, unsure if their home is everywhere or nowhere. They are foreigners in their countries of residence, but also in their countries of origin. They come from all social and economic strata. They include political refuges and diplomats, jet-setters and drifters, business executives and migrant workers, rock stars and illegal immigrants, rich retirees and vagabonds, world class athletes and starving artists. Hotels, motels, guest houses, and other temporary residences and lodgings are, for them, very important places. On the road and in the loneliness of the hotel rooms is where their lives unfold. This book is dedicated to them.

Relja and Vida Penezic are siblings. Relja is an artist and Vida is a writer. Their backgrounds and experiences are very similar as they both moved on from Belgrade of their youth to live in London, Paris, Moscow, Bowling Green-Ohio, New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles... After many years of working independently, they decided to juxtapose Vida's writings and Relja's images in one book–Art for Hotels. Their work is an examination of (a meditation on) experiences and states of mind known to most travelers: escapism, exoticism, freedom, discovery, foreignness, strangeness, anonymity, spirituality, cultural isolation, alienation, unease with both unfamiliar and familiar surroundings, etc. Stories and pictures in this book have been created independently and neither is a direct illustration of the other. Their creative focus, stemming from the similarities in the authors' backgrounds and experiences, however, causes an alchemic reaction that gives Art for Hotels a unique expressive quality, more spontaneous and powerful than any premeditated symmetry could have achieved.

* Similarity of the title with Brian Eno’s “Music for Airports” is not coincidental.