On Practice: Cooking

Serpentine Podcast

On Practice: Cooking asks how cooking can bring people together and provide nourishment and care? What are the ways that cooking together can open up difficult conversations - about racism, colonialism and migration? This episode highlights artist Jasleen Kaur’s collaboration with women from the Portman Early Childhood Centre through the Changing Play project Everyday Resistance, and includes Yogyakarta based artist and researcher Elia Nurvista’s reflections on food and power, and researcher and cook Fozia Ismail speaking about food as resistance.

On Practice is produced by Reduced Listening.

Image Credit: Joy Yamusangie.

Show Notes

Over the last year through the pandemic, we’ve seen more than ever how our individual actions impact others, how we’re all interdependent. This three-part podcast series explores the practices that can sustain us individually and collectively – Cooking, Listening and Walking - and how they can be used to bring people together to work towards change. Hosts Amal Khalaf and Alex Thorp welcome artists, collaborators and friends to explore ideas and projects developed as part of Serpentine’s Education and Civic programme, which connect communities, artists and activists to generate responses to pressing social issues. These are projects that have been developed in collaboration with people, centred on the body, the city, and exploring the injustices we experience in our everyday life. Hear from Jasleen Kaur, Elia Nurvista, Fozia Ismail, Ain Bailey, Micro Rainbow, Portman Early Childhood Centre, Ultra-red, Ximena Alarcón, Sam Curtis, Tim Ingold, Voice of Domestic Workers and Katouche Goll.

Each of the three episodes are accompanied by an exercise, kindly shared by the artists, an invitation to join their practice.

Jasleen Kaur was born in Glasgow and is now based in London. Her work is an ongoing exploration into the malleability of culture and the layering of social histories within the material and immaterial things that surround us. Her practice examines diasporic identity and hierarchies of history, both colonial and personal. She works with sculpture, video and writing.

Recent and forthcoming presentations include exhibitions and projects at the Wellcome Collection, UP Projects, Glasgow Women’s Library, Market Gallery, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Eastside Projects and Hollybush Gardens. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Government Art Collection, Touchstones Rochdale and the Crafts Council.

https://youtu.be/1j5XreNGtYk?t=1644

https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/everyday-resistance/

Instagram: @_jasleen.kaur_

Fozia Ismail, scholar, cook and founder of Arawelo Eats, a platform for exploring politics, identity and colonialism through East African food. Ismail is a researcher writing about race and British identity and has spoken at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, designed workshops with Keep It Complex, Jerwood Project Space and the Museum of London using food as a method to think through issues around race and empire in Britain today. Fozia is also part of Dhaquan Collective, a feminist art collective of Somali women, centering the voices of womxn and elders in the community, and privileging co-creation and collaboration. She was a City Fellow for the Arnolfini, Bristol in 2019. Her work has been published and featured in a range of media including Observer Food Magazine, Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery and BBC Radio 4 Food Programme.

https://www.dhaqan.org/

https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/radical-kitchen-2018-fozia-ismail-chilli/ https://www.araweloeats.com/

https://oxfordculturalcollective.com/fozia-ismail-food-as-resistance/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BfCuBZdhlc&list=PLbP2rruaw4OvyHmG5tYtqgtJ67xIJ5rOf&index=1

Instagram: @arawelo_eats

Elia Nurvista is an artist who lives and works in Yogyakarta, Indonesia whose practice focuses on food production and distribution and its broader social and historical implications. Food in various forms — from the planting of crops, to the act of eating and the sharing of recipes — are Nurvista’s entry point to exploring issues of economics, labour, politics, culture and gender. Her practice is also concerned with the intersection between food and commodities, and their relationship to colonialism, economic and political power, and status. She runs Bakudapan, a food study group that undertakes community and research projects, and her social research forms the background of her individual projects, presented through mixed media installations, food workshops and group discussion. Her previous installations use a range of materials from crystalline sugar sculptures to sacks of rice, often incorporating video or mural painting and an element of audience interaction.

www.elianurvista.com

www.bakudapan.com

Instagram: @elianurvista