07/01/2024
Out now:
at the kitchen table - exhibition guide
edited by Reliable Copy
co-published with Ark Foundation for the Arts
₹ 400 / € 12 / $ 13
Approaching curatorial practice from the perspective of publishing, 'at the kitchen table' looks at how food has historically been—and continues to be—inscribed through various conventional formats, as well as the channels and platforms by which it circulates as material, trace, memory, and culture. Imagined as a show of documents, this exhibition brings together a selection of cookbooks, videos, and artworks.
The cookbooks feature recipes and narratives compiled from artists and art-spaces, anthologies of recipes from literary fiction, cookbooks that function as historical records, and some that are self-published by individuals or community groups. The videos highlight and examine the well-worn format of the instructional cooking class and its associated performativity. Meanwhile, the artworks, each of which are presented via peripheral, referential, or stand-in documents, respond to (and sometimes assume) the forms of the menu, the recipe book, the stand-alone restaurant, the consumable product, the family archive, the assembly, and the feast.
The proposal, the script, the poster, the photographic documentation, the resource list, the newsletter, the Keynote presentation, and the audio recording—elements that are traditionally left out of the artwork’s exhibition display, but that are sometimes revealed in catalogues, monographs, or other publications around the work—become, in this exhibition, stand-ins for the works conceptually on display. Through this introduction of artworks as records and documents—as secondary material—and together with the cookbooks and videos, 'at the kitchen table' spills its premise across the exhibition and its documentation, the library and the gallery, and the event and its eventual publication.
Available now in India via Press Works (), in the UK and USA via Public Knowledge Books (), and in Europe via Les Presses du Reel.
