Heroine

Heroine is a series of images relating a dark love story. It is a rock opera in 2-D, featuring New York City anti-heroes Lou Reed and Nadia Nefariously. The introductory image is a trinity of punk children, soothsayers in a Greek-theatre-style chorus cautioning the lovers of what is to come. The tale’s protagonists both belong to the 1970s underground punk scene, that gladiatorial arena in which affliction and volatility reign. This is translated through the artworks, with Reed portrayed as a dark knight, black subway sludge dripping from his tarnished armour. Nadia Nefariously, best known for her glamorous strip-show performances, is “white light, white heat,” a platinum-haired goddess in rhinestone boots. In a torrent of creative synergy and romantic bliss, the two fuel each other’s most haunting works, Reed’s ambivalent “Heroin” and Nefariously’s “Cinderacula.” Though this “star-cross’d” pair are deeply in love, there is always turbulence and violence between them. The affair becomes a sadomasochistic one, inciting moments of sublime eroticism and ebbs of self-destruction. Ultimately, upon the death-knell entrance of Andy Warhol, Reed and Nefariously are forever separated, their “legendary hearts” demised by a magic realist sea storm. In creating these works I imbue them with the pains of romantic passion-jealousy, fear, sadness-made manifest: mark-making here is raw and explosive, scarring the satin canvas. Reaching heights of 10 and 11 feet, these pieces convey an epic tale through epic proportions. Collage elements and written scraps give the images further dimension and texture. Rendered with various media, from oil paint to Sharpie pen, these images communicate the monstrous and sensual quality of this story in a way that is kinetic and careful, violent and tender. The sheen of the various fabrics suggests trash-glamour and celebrity skin. Contact: [email protected]

Seasoned

Changing human consumption patterns and sustenance have always created new ripples of change. Be it food for our bodies, or material for industries – all progress via trade, barter, exchange and securities has been founded on systems of creating excess. Tea traveled the world and so did coffee and cocoa. Indian food may well be synonymous with chili, but chili was not indigenous to India, nor was the potato or tomato. But then, nothing belongs to any one region any more. Food has traveled from its regions of origin by conquests of colonization or peaceful trade. Yet, what we cook: does it ‘belong’ to us? Do its flavors? Or does it belong to memories, cohabiting with all that lives there: childhood games to see who could shell the most peas, moist kitchen floors, the first time you saw blood, and the lavish spread of both birthdays and Tehravin? What was it for you? How does food tell your story? Whose stories does it tell as it travels from Gujarat, Manipur, Kashmir, Dantewada to the meal you are here invited to share

Skipping

Like the ragpicker, “everything that the big city threw away, everything it lost, everything it despised, everything it crushed underfoot, he catalogues and collects…sorts things out and makes a wise choice” (Sontag 1977:78). My first experience with skipping involved crawling under a fence in a London back alley adjacent to a Tesco. We were trying to gain entry into Tesco’s garbage: a set of bins under lock- and-key. We did this not out of necessity but by choice. Skipping, also known as dumpster diving, is the act of going through commercial food waste to find edible items. The dented beer cans, the mounds of bread, the Brussels sprouts with a premature expiration date, the individually wrapped sushi rolls sold just moments ago. These were the type of food items one could successfully pluck from the dark. Squatters were the ones who showed me how to skip successfully. Their logic was divergent from traditional institutionalized aestheticism; they had adopted a view of the city not as a space for consumption but as a space for alternative living. Squatter culture is unrefined with a focus on creativity and self-expression through bricolage and culturally subversive activities. This branch of squatting is related to Western Marxism and the rise of Marxist Geography within the 1970s. Generally, squatters do not belong to the upper class, they do not follow what David Harvey calls the excessive logics of accumulation like that of the city tourist. Squatters locate or buy items out of necessity, refraining from making purchases as symbols of wealth, power or prestige. This appeal to necessity-based action is also present in their views towards food consumption practices and urban food policies. Taken with a camera purchased for one euro and gifted expired film, these photos are meant to be forensic, intimate and ‘anti-aesthetic’. They are personal images that highlight both the skipping process and the faces behind the movement

blóm + blóð

Video stills from the 8-minute video, entitled, blóm + blóð, produced during a residency at the Icelandic Textile Centre (Blönduós) in September 2016. blóm + blóð presents performance as embodied research, in the landscape as laboratory/studio. The artist navigates the autumnal terrain of Norðurland vestra, collecting natural dye and fibre stuffs, using landscape elements as tools for making, and experimenting with flora and fauna in the creation of a textile work. The end (textile) result is never shown, the emphasis being on process as the creative work in focus, and the acquisition of new knowledge as one of the results. Utilizing the landscape as a laboratory means more than simply the outdoor acquisition of art/craft materials – it mobilizes human empathy (through experiential learning) in gaining an ecological awareness of the source of materials one works with, fostering a working relationship with the environment and its agents. The video plays with notions of temporality and labour, but also with ideas of material agency, in terms of Jane Bennett’s, Vibrant Matter, where “efficacy or agency depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces.” In the video, a deliberate romanticization of landscape (as within the landscape tradition in art, as well as touristic notions of place) is disrupted by the practical necessities of Icelandic life, such as the sheep slaughter. Likewise, engagement with the messiness of the body is embraced as necessary on the path towards aesthetic outcome. The hegemonic notion of studio space, as isolated and hidden rooms where masterpieces are hatched, is subverted as the creative process is literally exposed

Food for Thought: Food, Embodiment, and Knowledge

The paradox of studying food is that scholars necessarily rely on the very instruments of discourse that reify a hierarchy of the senses designed to render food unworthy of serious thought: Images and texts appeal to the “higher” sense of sight; they “figure the material as intellectual, imaginative, symbolic, aesthetic,” Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson claims (2004, 17). Reason cannot be found in the “lower” senses while eating reminds us too much of our body’s needs. But Krishnendu Ray reminds us that “much of the sociology of the body continues to be devoted to theoretical argumentation focussed on gender, sexuality, and disease, belying the sense that all social action {…} is always embodied” (2016, 26)

Across the Unseen Sea and Dinner for Deep Surface Divers

Dinner for Deep Surface Divers uses food as a poetic medium, where eating is depicted as a highly sensual act, while exploring the role of the senses and embodiment in informing our vision. Across the Unseen Sea captures the essence of a multi-sensory banquet that I created and which took place in London, in 2013. I based the event on William Morris’s diary entries from his journey to Iceland, in 1871/73 and “translated” these into a multi-sensory immersive performance. The project was developed in collaboration with Charles Michel (cook and researcher at Charles Spence’s Crossmodal Research laboratory, Oxford), as well as a team of dedicated collaborators from various backgrounds and with different professional expertise (set, sound, scent designers, actors, food historians etc.). The film was created with the intention of communicating the subjective, multi-sensory experience of one of the guests, a writer, by audio-visual

Blurred, Broken, and Bewildered: What Performing with Food does with the Lines Around Performance and Food Studies

Discipline, authority, rigor, expertise. When it comes to food and food scholarship, how do we perform success? Does food present the same requirements for knowledge-making as the other modes of existence that we investigate? Or does it open up a space in which to challenge those requirements, make rifts in the academic fabric, and present tantalizing threads on which to gleefully tug

Tactics and dissonance: bending social relations towards justice, through art

The idea for this special issue arose out of meetings of the Arts-Centered, Community-Engaged Social Sciences Research (A.C.C.E.S.S.) Collaborative at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada. Beginning in 2013, a group of faculty and recent graduates began meeting on a regular basis to discuss how, why, under what conditions or with what caveats art enables new social relations. All of us attend to the politics of representation in our work; some of us had specifically analyzed or curated art exhibits; and, many of us also gravitated towards arts-informed practices in our research and teaching. Located in different departments and faculties, we came together to discuss the difference of performance, storytelling, and images in the production of social knowledges as compared to conventional scholarly text

Disempathy and emotional witnessing in passport photography

Passport photography bans the display of emotion and aims at suppressing what speaks to our individual circumstances. This paper argues that the disempathy that results provides a starting point for moral imagination and a method for preserving political engagement beyond the reach of the state. The sharing of emotion concerns political theorists, however, who worry that judgment can be swamped by sentiment, making empathy an unruly or unreliable political resource. Passports represent an aspiration to regulate complex emotions by making identity and belonging a matter of state prerogative rather than interpersonal exchange. The rise of biometrics provides an opportunity to bring emotion under state supervision, dictating its display in a manner that echoes forms of social and racial performance. Efforts to pacify citizens may boomerang, nonetheless, by setting the conditions for unconventional forms of looking and recognition, methods available to individuals but not the states that govern them

Fat Politics Photography: The Stareable Body and “Openings” for Social Justice

In complicating understandings of art’s effects, critical theorists mobilize the notion of “openings” to surface simultaneously the unpredictability and indeterminacy of ethical engagement as well as its possibility. I explore the potential of these ideas and consider their application through Haley Morris-Cafiero’s photography on fatness and disability in her Wait Watchers series. Through problematizing surveillance and staring relations, between the observed Fat woman and her watchers, and interrogating the constitution of the monstrous other, the photography unsettles regimes of normalization in relation to fatness and disability. The images invite recognition for embodied difference as they register the complexity and difficulty of social justice “openings” for anomalous embodiment