The foundation of my practice is rooted in the kitchen. Its role is to excavate and examine our relationship with food through the use of objects and conversations that are sacrosanct to the kitchen. These constant figures call attention to our consumption of food and what binds us to a meal. Food has become an impetus for sharing stories and memories.
Memory is a salient pillar in my practice. It often reflects the anthropological setting of a table and the objects attached to visual memory. This manifests itself in temporal installations. They are considered as a space that mediates between time and the unattainable past, alluding to a sense of remembrance through multisensory experiences. Tamarind Drawer (2019) revisits conversations with my father about his childhood home. He uses objects and smells to signify particular moments in Palestine before he left. This is expressed through the use of sound, sight, smell and touch to archive the communion and assemble its remnants, allowing the audience to excavate the conversations with my father and understand the fragmented nostalgia.
Collaboration is another realm that feeds my process of creation. Working with a variety of creatives informs and pushes my practice further. The Faraway Bistro is an online collective made up of myself and co-creatives Freya Smith and Emilie Wall. We created the bistro through a series of zoom calls, connecting over our love of food. The purpose of the bistro is to break the ritualistic habits of a meal and redefine ways of interaction. The Faraway Bistro has created opportunities to host workshops and collaborate with a variety of practitioners worldwide. We recently held an online workshop titled Chew With Your Mouth Open as a part of Warehouse421’s 2021 Suhoor Program (an arts and design centre in Abu Dhabi, UAE) that allowed us to reach an international audience. Working predominantly online over the past year has taught me that to work with food does not mean that it must be anchored to a kitchen. Food can instead be used as a mechanism to disassemble ways of consumption and its inherently social, political and cultural roots.
Language has become intertwined in my understanding of food. I view food as a language that expresses means that may be twisted or arbitrary in our daily lives. I attempt to translate this language through photography, scanning and experimental writing. Using these mediums has introduced an element of control within my practice. This calls attention to the arbitrariness of the everyday. Writing (a recent addition) complements the visual work with figurative diction. Visual Hunger (2021), a photo essay created for Alserkal.online in Dubai, UAE, expresses beautification in the food industry as a form of distortion. I discuss its effect on our cravings and consumption of food.
This ever-evolving process has allowed me to challenge and experiment beyond the kitchen. Throughout each project, food has stayed a constant, but the mediums and forms of display have become variants that alter and transgress the conventional ways of consumption.