Workshop
30 March 2023–13 March 2023

Open Call | Rewilding the Kitchen

Alserkal Arts Foundation

A culinary programme exploring the intersections between art, writing, and the kitchen.

Starts 30 March 2023

Ends 13 March 2023

Venue Alserkal Arts Foundation

Warehouse 50/51

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Alserkal Arts Foundation and Nahla Tabbaa announce an open call to participate in Rewilding the Kitchen, a culinary programme that explores the intersections between art, writing, and the kitchen.

To ‘rewild’ is to restore a material or environment to its natural state; participants in this programme are invited to embrace the rewilding of shared ingredients and food that are local and available within our daily life and surroundings.

Allowing you to become an actor, maker or storyteller with agency, this could create the possibility of reclaiming and rewilding your own worlds while also becoming integral to our project. The programme invites artists, writers, chefs and culinary enthusiasts to explore research, fictional narratives and culinary processes through the lens of food.

How to Apply

To apply, you will need to fill out this form with your bio, statement of intent and confirm that you can commit to the sessions.

Deadline to apply is 13 March. Selected participants will be notified by 20 March.

Submissions are now closed

For any questions, please reach out to info@alserkalartsfoundation.ae

Commitment

To commit to this programme, you will need to attend the following sessions:

(please note late hours during Ramadan)

1 | Programme launch

30 March | 9-11:30pm

2 | The Fictional Recipe

8 April | 9-11:30pm

3 | Eating Colour

13 April | 9-11:30pm

Optional | Sharjah Biennial

16 April | 11am-4pm

4 | Making Tub Kim Krop

29 April | 11am -3pm

5 | Egyptifying Petit Fours and Preserving Coptic Traditions

6 May | 11am-3pm

6 | Defamiliarising and Deconstructing Ingredients

13 May | 11am-3pm

Optional | Film Screening

16 May | 7-9pm

7 | Finalising outcomes and personal projects

20 May | 11am-3pm

Optional | Film Screening

23 May | 7-9pm

8 | Final tasting exhibition

27 May | All day

Structure

Alserkal Arts Foundation's kitchen will be activated as a space to discuss, read, write and cook, with a cohort encouraging collective thinking, intersectionality and experimentation.

Through a series of sessions, led by Andrew Riad, Chef Priyal ‘Dulce de Mirchi’, Moza Almatrooshi, Nahla Tabbaa and Sondos Azzam, participants will be creating and cultivating ideas. Other sessions will include film screenings, independent work in the kitchen, contributing to a publication, and preparing for a final dinner/ tasting exhibition.

Outcomes

All research, recipe development and stories will culminate into a digital publication supported by the Alserkal Arts Foundation.

The final dinner will showcase experiments in the form of a tasting exhibition where members of the Alserkal community, the cohort and guests will attend.

The coming together of different disciplines hopes to encourage cross pollination and future collaborations.

About Rewilding the Kitchen

Rewilding the Kitchen was launched in 2021 as a programme that explored the practices and world-views of four artists—Salma Serry (Sufra Kitchen), Moza Al Matrooshi, Aya Shaban (Namliyeh) and Manal Abu Shmais (Namliyeh)— through the lens of food.

Consisting of three recipes and texts featured on alserkal.online, complemented, off-line, by dishes that popped up at workshops and tastings at various events in Alserkal Avenue, the programme invited ingredients to tell their own authentic stories and explored how these artists allowed for that.

For the second and more expansive iteration, the impetus for a residency programme with tangible outcomes became evident as the culinary and art landscape continues to grow and produce new outcomes for research and practice.

Read more:

Conversation with Namliyeh

Conversation with Salma Serry

Conversation with Moza Al Matrooshi

About Nahla Tabbaa

Nahla Tabbaa is an artist whose practice explores tensions between the urban and the organic, the beautiful and the grotesque. Sensitive to the self-organising agency of materials, she adventures into the world of immateriality and the intangible through experiments in alchemy and combining elements from the organic and inorganic. Her methods are intentionally slow-paced, meditative and labour intensive and permeate strands of her everyday life to heal and harmonise her otherwise fast-paced life.

She earned her MA in Curatorial Practice from the Bath School of Art and Design (2012), and her BFA in Sculpture from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design (2009). She previously led and developed the community programme at Sharjah Art Foundation, and has developed education projects independently and in collaboration with institutions including Art Jameel, Warehouse 421, and the Beacon House National Trust University. She was previously a culinary navigator and researcher at Frying Pan Adventures; is the co-founder of The Alchemy of Dyeing; Forsa School; a critical and professional programme for artists and Daftar Asfar; a sketchbook publishing collective. Her work has been presented at 421 (2022), Art Dubai (2021), the 8th cohort of the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (2021), Jameel Arts Centre Park Projects (2021) and is represented by Beyyn. In the culinary world she has led performance dinners and explorations at 421 in collaboration with Moza Almatrooshi, Al Serkal Avenue, Myocum and Amman Design Week, and has curated Sufra with Frying Pan Adventures and Rewilding the Kitchen with Alserkal Online. She has written for Alserkal Online and East East World.

Image credit: Kathleen Hoare for East East World (2021)