How can food encapsulate belonging, identity, heritage as well as intricacies within localized to globalized landscapes? What do the ways in which we consume food and culture tell us about the human condition when examined through a critical historical lens and in a contemporary context? And if the personal is the political and the political personal, how might this also apply to food?
More than sixty artists from over twenty countries attempt to reckon with these questions across painting, photography, sculpture, film, and installation in MOCAK’s latest exhibition “Food in Art”, the 11th edition of an ongoing series around “Civilization in Art.”
Whether through representation or abstraction, minimalism or maximalism, the depiction and contextualization of food has made its mark throughout art history up through contemporary art. In still life paintings, depictions of food often hold allegories for the meaning of life and death, morals, values, and symbolism around religion, mythology, and culture. In contemporary artistic practices, the meaning-making found around food often touches upon these traditions as well as encompasses a wide breadth of issues and phenomena, often leaving us with more questions than answers. A few of the many themes posed throughout the exhibition invite the visitor to consider the power dynamics around food, the cultivation of identity and belonging, and the ways we come together around a shared meal and table.
Food as a catalyst for rituals and memory
Food as a social ritual, a manifestation of familial, cultural, and social ties can often play into acute nostalgia for traditions of the past as well as attempt to reinvent and create new meaning from the mundane. The cultural codes around how and what we consume and the significance we thus attribute can provoke a sense of familiarity that is both comforting as well as profoundly grief inducing when no longer there. One piece that seeks to enmesh ceremonies of old in a recontextualized fashion refers to a typical drapery of 17th to 18th century Poland in a renegotiated ritual. With rows and rows of food stretched across this large scale funeral piece, it’s hard not to be reminded of the elephant in the cycle-of-life room– that we are what we eat. And we as human beings are also consumed in the ravenous, cyclical appetite of nature and our own mortality.
In Krzysztof Bednarski’s minimalist installation comprising just three objects– a white wooden, slightly ricketty kitchen table, handwritten notes of various sizes and ages laid atop, and a small painted Madonna and child piece hung above – he manages to provoke deeply personal memories as well as elements of universality. He instantly creates what for many is an iconic, familiar scene of the rituals around food in the absence of food itself. Additionally, upon closer examination, these handwritten notes quickly reveal themselves to have been composed by the artist’s mother, spanning many a year and meal. In the careful detailing of the dishes she prepared, we also come to find the last note she wrote before her passing at the bottommost corner of the rows of notes, bringing this series of rituals to their inevitable, melancholic conclusion. This carefully crafted archive of care and of the all too commonly unacknowledged labors often assigned to motherhood, the who behind the making and execution of rituals around food emerges as a defining question, arguably superseding the ritual making itself. This brings to question if these rituals – and ritual makers – are as carefully acknowledged and celebrated in their lifetimes as they are in memorial?
Food as indicative of security and (the renegotiation of) belonging
Arguably on the most fundamental of levels, our relationship with food is deeply enmeshed with questions of nourishing both a very real need for security as well as cultivating a sense of belonging. Sustenance commodified is a recurring theme in our commercialized physical and digital landscapes full of advertisements and stimuli seeking to buy our attention for a costly price. Artists such as Jonathan Blaustein seek to address the issue of what it costs to nourish ourselves in his photographic series “The Value of the Dollar.” The economic realities of what we consume are all too apparent with the visualization of what quantity of a given edible item one can buy for one US dollar. The results will leave the less privileged unsurprised, with such stark comparisons as a cheeseburger with exactly 10 blueberries.
A section dedicated to examining the history and renegotiation of sexist tropes around food, such as a woman’s place being in the kitchen, brings this into both localized and universal contexts. With icons such as Natalia LL, who through her portraits pose questions still resonating with women decades later around the cognitive dissonance of both embracing sexuality as well as resisting objectification, to a contemporary performance piece entitled “Resistance Kitchen” by Małgorzata Markiewicz, we find these tropes are still ever prevalent today. In the case of Markiewicz’s performance, she renegotiates the purpose of the kitchen for women through her gastronomic response laden with dark irony and lethal recipes for women to serve to their patriarchal counterparts in commentary around the lack of proper legal recourse around domestic violence.
“From Warhol eating the Whooper from Burger King to golden moulds of fast food to embroidered Kellogg’s cereal boxes and gummy bear bags, we see food exhibited as a reflection of our collective consciousness around mass culture. A tale as old as time – or at least as old as pop culture.”
Food as a mirror for mass culture, heritage, and as resistance
From Warhol eating the Whooper from Burger King to golden moulds of fast food to embroidered Kellogg’s cereal boxes and gummy bear bags, we see food exhibited as a reflection of our collective consciousness around mass culture. A tale as old as time – or at least as old as pop culture. There are also artists who incorporate food into their work in the most literal sense, such as a painterly composition made up of actual chocolate by Bednarski and an installation of products with varying expiration dates by Oskar Dawicki. As a twist on site-specific work, Dawicki selects a range of food items that are due to expire at various points throughout the exhibition’s year-long running, marking the passing of time with a corresponding clock counting down the exact date of expiration for each item.
The messy and all too ugly realities around the rise of consumerism and unethical means of food production done in the name of progress compounded by acute rises in disparity around social justice and human rights issues such as food insecurity and human-made famine as a weapon of war and genocide create a dystopian reality to our bystander horror of the 21st century. Artists have often been members of the frontlines of resistance, speaking truth to power around injustices and atrocities through their work as well as personalizing the political through their creative interpretations of their lived experiences, heritages, and identities.
Whether in Polish artist Anna Ostoya’s “Refugee and Student Food Rations in the USA, 2022 (Refugee Meal at Afghan Refugee Center, Flor Bliss, Texas, 2021 / Student Meal at Parishville-Hopkinton School, New York, 2022), who speaks to the dystopian realities many are living in when it comes to mass feeding; to Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova creating a dual landscape of resistance with a kitchen table laid with Palianytsia, a traditional Ukrainian welcome bread, made of rounded stones from the Carpathian mountains; to Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar’s sculptural work “Ka’ak Al Quds (Bread of Jerusalem)” and video piece “We Smuggled One Thousand Ka’ak”, who often incorporates physical and metaphorical borders, checkpoints, and walls paired with food in his work to pull back the veil on life under Israeli occupation, many artists play a critical part in archiving the present and piercing through our collective consciousness (or oftentimes, willful blindness) through artistic dissent.
Food as a place to gather, converse, and question
Gathering around the kitchen table over a meal holds both meaningful common ground and universality while also containing countless intricate unique lived experiences. Tables exhibited as both physical structures and two-dimensional depictions throughout the exhibition mark this symbol in often contrasting and difficult ways, also serving as distinct intersections of an otherwise sprawling, interwoven exhibition layout.
The exhibition is not without controversy around selected works and artists. As is often the tradition of museums as they attempt to reckon with complicated legacies of institutions hoarding power, culture, memory, and objects, many contemporary museums are trying to redefine themselves and the rules– or throw out the rulebook altogether. Which brings us to an even more expansive question: are there artistic, moral, or ethical dimensions to consider around who and what can be exhibited and why, particularly in times marked with acute global strife and chaos – and perhaps even more importantly – should there be? Or is it the art museum’s role to provide a judicious space for these difficult conversations to be held, in all their messiness and discomfort?
For the latter to more likely resonate, proactivity in creating an environment that embraces nuance and intentionality in its decision making would prove a valuable first step. Rather than resorting to a simplistic default of raising issues and presenting work for shock value in the name of artistic freedom of expression, instead framing these discourses with a wide breadth of positionality and perspectives, more seats being brought to the (kitchen) table and intentionality that actively seeks to bridge, rather than polarize. How can museums foster a space to come together, to sit in discomfort, and to question not only what is being shown, but what the work is trying to convey, why, and by whom?
Visit the “Food in Art” to ponder these questions further and discover more artists, themes, and issues around the contextualization of food, on view until 16 March 2025.
Food in Art
MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków
12.04.2025 – 16.03.2025
curators: Maria Anna Potocka and Martyna Sobczyk
