1st Edition
Tastes of Justice The Aesthetics and Politics of Food-Art Practices in Asia and Australia
Tastes of Justice reveals the diversity of creative and cultural practices in contemporary food art and performances in and between Asia and Australia. It examines the ways in which these engender new frameworks for the sensuous, affective, social, and material dimensions of the alimentary in creative practice.
It interleaves scholarly chapters by artists, curators, theorists, and historians with artists’ perspectives in the form of visual essays, recipes, and case studies. In doing so, it offers conceptual framings in art and curatorial practice and critical understandings of lived experience, challenging the normative epistemologies that typically operate between aesthetics and politics in food art and performance.
The book critically engages with themes including enculturation, diaspora, museology, sustainability, activism, and socially engaged art; it reworks notions of collaboration, correspondence, and commensality in human and more-than-human relations. Tastes of Justice offers its readers unique techniques to attend to invisibilities, inequalities, relationalities, and justice, where the politics of food art is inseparable from its aesthetics – from the way it tastes.
1. From Commensality to Cultural Difference: A Critical Introduction Marnie Badham, Francis Maravillas, Stephen Loo, and Madeleine Collie 2. The Edible Archive: Performative Repasts and Art History in Singapore Francis Maravillas 3. Nasi Goreng Diplomacy: Diplomatizing Politicized Rice Chu Hao Pei 4. Strange and Difficult Fruit: Durian as a Marker of Time in Southeast Asian Contemporary Art Joella Kiu 5. The Social Kitchen: Art and Collaborative Survival in Indonesia Bianca Winataputri 6. The Taste of Iron: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue Ariana Chaivaranon 7. Therapeutic Botany: Plant Medicine in Contemporary Art Rebecca Blake 8. Boat Noodle Soup Three Ways: Some Notes on Hospitality, Indeterminacy and Cultural Exchange in Food-Art Performance and Social Practice Marnie Badham, Ploy Kasama Yamtree, Stephen Loo, and Michael Hornblow 9. Bakudapan: Please Eat Wildly Bakudapan Food Study Group 10. MMMEEOW: Mapping Migratory Meeals at the Ends of Worlds Stephen Loo, Poppy de Souza, Samid Suliman, and Marnie Badham 11. Mutton Fishing: The Importance of the Ocean for Cultural Continuity Jodi Edwards 12. The Sensory and the Social: Food, Memory, and Community Engagement in Aftertaste Megan R. Fizell 13. Chew Chew Spit Spit and A Jeepney Ride Rice Brewing Sisters Club 14. Following Vegetal Worlds: Towards Expanded Curatorial Methods Madeleine Collie 15. If a coconut falls: Cultural Reclamation Through Colonial Archives Keg de Souza 16. Multispecies Commensality: Sharing a Meal with Fungi, Chickpeas, and Seaweed Alia Parker 17. Putting Your Stomach on the Line: Justice, Vulnerability, and Hospitality in Food-Art Praxis Lindsay Kelley and Cassandra Tytler 18. A Coda in Recipes for Tasting Justice Stephen Loo, Madeleine Collie, Marnie Badham, and Francis Maravillas
Biography
Francis Maravillas is Programme Leader, BA (Hons) Art Histories and Curatorial Practices: Asia and the World, and Senior Lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore.
Marnie Badham is an Associate Professor, School of Art, RMIT University, Naarm/Melbourne, and a director for Res Artis: Worldwide Network for Artist Residencies.
Stephen Loo is Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle, Australia and formerly Professor of Interdisciplinary Design at UNSW.
Madeleine Collie is a curator, writer, and researcher whose work engages with the politics of plants, poetics, and ecological relations in contemporary art.
This volume is a timely response to the burgeoning practices of food-based art and their politics, highlighting some of the most compelling demonstrations of this in Asia and Australia today. It is unique not just for how it connects creative and critical inquiries into the aesthetics and politics of food with urgent questions of justice and care, but also as a rare gathering of artist writings. Significantly, the book’s critical layering of artist voices alongside the perspectives of scholars and curators in and from Asia and Australia contributes to the ‘discursive density’ being called for by leading thinkers and practitioners in the evolving field of contemporary art.
Michelle Antoinette, Associate Professor in Art History and Theory at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia
This is a book that is bursting at the seams with ideas, offering multi-disciplinary critical insights into food art in Asia and Australia. Combining approaches from historians, curators and artists working with communities allows the reader glimpses into the often hidden and less theorised processes of social art practices where the event of ingredients being sourced, food prepared, cooked and served facilitates intercultural exchanges and postcolonial self-reflection among artists, community cooks and consumers of food and food-art.
Gaik Cheng Khoo, Professor and Deputy Dean of Research and Sustainability, Sunway University in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
