SIMMER

EJ Son’s practice examines power relations across gender, sexuality, race, politics and art history. They also reference or find inspiration in food such as potato, egg, cucumber and carrot, in the creation of sculptural or ceramic works. Titty tree is a new sculptural light work by EJ Son, using the bottoms of capsicum and tomato as inspiration. The underside of these vegetables form flowery patterns, which have been cast in silicone to create 444 nipple flowers, in response to an interaction the artist had with their halmeoni:

I hadn’t seen my grandma in over fifteen years when I visited her in Korea during a particularly brutal winter. I had newly adopted a feminist perspective and disposed of every bra I owned. My grandma greeted me excitedly, but as I took my coat off, her eyes caught my hardened nipples piercing through my layers. She burst out laughing and asked if she could take a look at them. Hesitant, but as one might offer their palms to a fortune teller, I leaned in so she could take a closer look at my stretched out sweater. She cackled louder, “Just like your mother!!! They will bring you a good husband!!! Just like your father!!!”

Eva Aguila is an artist and organiser based in NYC. Her experimental practice ranges from sound, video and performance, and more recently has been informed by the oral histories of rural community members in Michoacán, where her parents lived before moving to Los Angeles. In Comida a Mano, Eva Aguila interviews her father and cousin on the importance of tortilla in Mexican culture.

Food is central to my Mexican heritage, and I believe it tells the story of our roots and how we once lived. Besides language, food is an integral way to pass on culture. I ask, what is a utensil? Growing up, there was always a big stack of tortillas in the middle of the dining table during meals. We would rarely see utensils on the table (only on the occasion of eating soup). This is the cultural norm for a lot of families yet still can be seen as strange in western-centric dining etiquette. The unspoken questions about class and being “civilised” come to light during interviews with my father and cousin in Comida a Mano.

Itsuo Kobayashi began working at a soba restaurant in Saitama, northwest of Tokyo, when he was 26 years old and during this time began to make detailed illustrations with written thoughts about food or meals he had eaten. After twenty working as a soba chef, Itsuo Kobayashi retired due to developing a neurological condition that restricts his movement. However, he has never stopped making artwork. Itsuo Kobayashi consistently orders food to be delivered to his home, and illustrates each meal in detail, filling in the blank spaces of his compositions with meal names, prices and opinions about the food and ingredients used. In some illustrations, descriptive words such as “delicious” are jotted down to recall good memories for those nostalgic moments when he flicks through earlier works. Itsuo Kobayashi has produced over 1000 illustrations across the past three decades.

Nabilah Nordin is a sculptor whose installations playfully embrace wonky craftwork and material invention. Domestic Dough Facility is no exception. By romanticising the behind the scenes process of ‘making’ in a studio or bakery, this non-functional dough machine plays on the aesthetics of industrial food production. While drawing from manufacturing contraptions such as conveyor belts, silos, funnels and tubes to shape each dough machine, these parts serve no actual function.

Without functionality, these machines become curious monuments, serving only as support for displaying dough and bread. Nabilah Nordin’s material interest in dough stems from its lumpy, oozy, skin-like and elastic sculptural potential, while the familiar yet strangely static material overloads the senses in a wondrous and absurd way.

Navi Kaur is an artist and arts educator based in Birmingham, UK. Her practice is inspired by the lives of her budimom and baba ji as she intimately and playfully documents scenes of domestic, cultural and spiritual significance. Mērā Ghar is a video installation that replicates notions of her grandparents’ family home, garden allotment and place of worship. By presenting intimate footage of family, faith and food, the work explores the interconnected nature of spaces such as the home, the land and the Gurdwara for Sikh communities, revealing the level of care, love and discipline employed when cooking, gardening and reciting prayers.

Visitors are advised to remove their shoes before stepping inside the shed as this practice is customary before entering any Gurdwara.

Rice Brewing Sisters Club are a collective based in South Korea who explore the idea of social fermentation. Their practice ranges from visual art, performance, creative writing, oral history, ecological thinking and auntie wisdoms. Rice Brewing Sisters Club experiment with ways to cultivate social networks between microorganisms, humans and the natural and urban environment throughout Southeast Asia. Thinking of fermentation as more than just a biochemical process, the Social Fermentation Archive is a compilation of the sisters’ travels across South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore and Taiwan, connecting voices and practices engaged in social fermentation.

The Social Fermentation Archive consists of fermentation recipes, intercultural conversations and actions, collective practices, decolonial histories, geographical and geological observations, rituals and belief systems, all of which are conveyed in various forms of text, image, video, objects, and mapping experiments. The breadth of this social fermentation – both within the archive and among the travelled sites – reveals how important sharing cultural knowledge across national borders can be.