Tastes of Justice: the politics of food-art practices in Asia and Australia (1)
2 December 2022 at 2:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Dr Marnie Badham, RMIT University
Professor Stephen Loo, UNSW
Assistant Professor Francis Maravillas, National Taipei University of Education
Session Speakers
Bianca Winataputri, Monash University
Rebecca Blake, Australian National University
Joella Kiu, Singapore Art Museum
The diverse food-art practices in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand highlight critical issues relating to the ethics and politics of curating relational practices of commensality and hospitality (Badham & Maravillas, 2019). These performative, social, and material practices engender diverse forms of cultural expression and creatively mediate cultural relations by tapping into transnational and diasporic vectors of connection to an imagined ‘home’ (Ang et al., 2000). While artists engaging with foodways can draw our attention to pressing concerns of sovereignty, race, migration, gender, labour, and climate change - the curation and exhibition of these practices raise both practical and conceptual issues. Cooking and galleries rarely mix, foodstuffs are difficult to collect, and eating creates unpredictable experiences (Badham & Maravillas, 2022). Gallery exhibitions can remove these practices from their cultural and community contexts, uncritically staging demonstrations of food cultures as spectacle, flattening their sensory and social complexities (Badham & Maravillas, 2019), as well as overlooking non-normative affects and dissonant perceptions (Loo, 2022).
Hosted by artist-curator-researchers, Marnie Badham (RMIT University) Stephen Loo (UNSW) and Francis Maravillas (National Taipei University of Education) this double panel will explore ‘the tastes of justice’ including both performative lectures as ‘cooking demonstrations’ and critical examinations of ‘curation as demonstration’ to consider the affective, sensuous, and culturally and politically attuned potential of food-art practices. Your ‘dinner hosts’ will frame the sessions with appetisers and palate cleansers across our afternoon menu of diverse ‘tastes of justice’ served up by Bianca Winataputri, Rebecca Blake, Joella Kiu, Madaleine Trigg, and Alia Parker. Presenters and audiences online are encouraged to snack, sip and slurp their way through the afternoon of dialogue, discourse, performance and provocations together.
Rapuh Bersama, makan Bersama, bangkit bersama (Be vulnerable together, eat together, rise together)
Bianca Winataputri, Monash University
In May 2020, Yogyakarta-based artist collective Mes56 initiated Dapur Umum 56/Dapur #Solidaritas, a communal kitchen and program where artists come together to cook, share and deliver ready-to-eat meals to local communities as means of driving collaborative survival during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their statement for the public kitchen reads: ‘Rapuh Bersama, makan Bersama, bangkit bersama’ (Be vulnerable together, eat together, and rise together). The project has since continued and sustained itself through community donations becoming a platform for knowledge- sharing, exchange, solidarity, and rethinking distributions of power. Most recently in 2021, Dapur Umum 56 participated in Biennale Jogja: Indonesia with Oceania where they collaborated with collectives and communities from East Indonesia. In June 2022, Jakarta- based collective GUDSKUL opened GUDKITCHEN as part of Documenta15 in Kassel, Germany. The social kitchen is nestled in the back corner of the Fridericianum museum, with a large blue tarp spread across the edges of the building to provide shade. The makeshift, DIY structure resembles a warung (Indonesian stall), transforming the monumental, almost intimidating structure of the European museum into a cosy hang-out area. Gudkitchen was setup for a specific purpose: to provide free meals primarily for participating artists, curators, collectives, art handlers, and often-times also visitors. In both initiatives, the kitchen becomes a site for gathering, meal sharing, impromptu karaoke, a meeting-point of cultures, stories, and mutual support. This proposal aims to examine the relationship between the kitchen and the institution (Biennale Jogja and Documenta), and the ways in which solidarity, care, and gathering are entwined in food-art practices in Indonesia.
Food and Medicine [working >tle]
Rebecca Blake, Australian National University
This paper examines how contemporary ar>sts Fiona Hall, Janet Laurence, and Simryn Gill mine thecomplex history of edible and medicinal plants in their works of art. The paper speaks tocontemporary and historical accounts of plant bioprospec>ng and exploita>on of tradi>onalknowledge, intertwined with narra>ves of cultural connec>on and resilience. It aims to shed lighton the ar>s>c interroga>on of food poli>cs, colonialism, commerce, healing, and connec>on toplace through an examina>on of the substances we consume. This analysis reveals new insights into humankinds’ rela>onship with the plants we ingest forsustenance and healing. Janet Laurence’s Japanese medicinal hut installa>onElixir(2005) exploresconnec>on to nature through imbibing medicinal plants. Simryn Gill’sForking tongues(1992)speaks to colonial trade of chillies from South America in the fiYeenth century. FionaHall’s Medicine bundle for the non-born child(1993) examines the trade and cultural history of twoingredients of Coca-Cola, the Kola nut and the Coca leaf, and her installa>onCash Crop(1998)delves into large-scale agriculture, systems of classifica>on, and nineteenth century food museums.These works of art cross the boundaries of art, science, and medicine, igni>ng conversa>ons aboutthe cultural context of our food systems.
Strange Fruit
Joella Kiu, Singapore Art Museum
This paper is interested in cultural entanglements and micro-narratives by way of tropical fruit – particularly the durian—by building upon frameworks of ecological consciousness. With the durian, urban legends, myths, and lofty claims abound around both its production and consumption. These stories are often nostalgic, and I read them as being symptomatic of larger contemporary conditions such as migration, urbanisation, and economic development. This paper is also interested in how we mark time in the tropics.
Fruit such as the durian can also serve as shorthand for the changing seasons in tropical climates. This paper will engage with this through Tiyan Baker, Nathan Beard and Khairullah Rahim’s practices. These artists approach the durian as a cultural object, an artifact of history, or a carrier bag of fictions to arrive at temporally complicated understandings of how connection is experienced within the region. These are also artists that present an alternative, and unabashedly intimate, understanding of ecology. By studying the visual vestiges of durian, this paper proposes thinking about context in ecology by way of pliable time: by moving beyond the fruit as subject to consider how it is evocative of networks that are built on fallacies and patterns of failure.
Biographies
Dr Marnie Badham, RMIT University
Marnie Badham With a 25-year history of art and justice practice in Canada and Australia, Marnie’s research sits at the intersection of socially engaged art, participatory methodologies, and the politics of cultural measurement. Through forms of encounter and exchange, Marnie’s research brings together disparate groups of people in dialogue to examine and affect local issues. Recent collaborations include public performance in the Dandenong Ranges; public art commissioning on Wurundjeri and Bunurong lands; curatorial projects on food-art-politics; and creative cartographies registering emotion in public space. Marnie is CI on Ambitious and Fair: towards a sustainable visual arts sector and is Senior Lecturer, School of Art, RMIT University.
Assistant Professor Francis Maravillas, National Taipei University of Education
Francis Maravillas is Assistant Professor in the Critical and Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art (CCSCA) program at the National Taipei University of Education, Taiwan. His research focuses on contemporary art and curating in Asia, exhibition histories, socially engaged and performative practices in art. He is currently writing a book on the aesthetics and politics of food in contemporary Asian art. He is area editor (Asia-Pacific) of the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas journal. He was previously a board member of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia.
Professor Stephen Loo, UNSW
For more than thirty years, Stephen has researched, taught and practiced in the transdisciplinary nexus of architecture, design, philosophy, psychology, performance and science. He has published widely in architecture and design theory, biophilosophy, posthumanist ethics, ecological humanities and experimental digital thinking and practice. He is currently working on the relations between thinking, justice and the psychophysiology of eating. Stephen is Professor of Design at UNSW Sydney/Gadi and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Philosophical Technologies, Arizona State University.
Bianca Winataputri, Monash University
Bianca Winataputri is a Melbourne-based independent curator, writer and PhD candidate in Art History and Theory at Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA). She was recently Public Programs coordinator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) and previously Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Australia, where she was part of a curatorium for the major exhibition Contemporary Worlds: Indonesia. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne and completed her Honours (first class) at the Australian National University where she received the Janet Wilkie Prize for Art History in 2017. Bianca’s research is focused on Southeast Asian contemporary art exhibitions and artistic practices.
Rebecca Blake, Australian National University
Rebecca Blake is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the AustralianNa>onal University. Her PhD >tle isThe fallible body: plant-based medicine in contemporaryAustralian art[working >tle]. She works as a Curatorial Assistant in Australian Pain>ng andSculpture at the Na>onal Gallery of Australia. She has contributed essays to the publica>ons HughRamsay (2019) andLove & Desire: Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces from the Tate(2018) and haswriaen for publica>ons includingArtonview, Art Monthly and Ar>st Profile.
Joella Kiu, Singapore Art Museum
Joella Kiu is a curator, editor, and art historian whose research extends into thetransmission, reception and localisation of ecological frameworks within Southeast Asian contemporary art practices. Joella is currently Assistant Curator at the Singapore Art Museum. Recent curatorial projects include Lonely Vectors (2022, Singapore Art Museum), REFUSE (2022, Singapore Art Museum) and to gather: The Architecture of Relationships (2021, Singapore Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia). Joella holds an MA in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art (2017), and a BA in History of Art from the University of York (2015).