Gathering as a Metaphor: Reliable Copy’s at the kitchen table
In one of his entertaining declamations from the Futurist Cookbook, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti writes, “Men think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink.” He calls for the abolition of pasta in a section of his humorously absurd manifesto to establish a style of cuisine more suited to modernity, and somewhere manages to reaffirm a well-known fact: food is paramount and palpably difficult to unravel if approached tediously. The Futurist Cookbook was recently on display as part of at the kitchen table, Reliable Copy’s inaugural exhibition in Bengaluru. Described as a show of documents, it took shape in and as the interstitial, advocating for the intangibilities that perpetuate inscriptions, understandings and associations with food. Over conversations with Nihaal Faizal and Sarasija Subramanian of Reliable Copy, I look at what it means for food to inhabit an interlocutory site within the exhibitionary space.
An interest in food and its linkages converging around the cookbook drew Faizal and Subramanian towards experimenting with a publication. This resulted in the 1ShanthiRoad Cookbook. Soon after, they began collecting books experimenting with this particular format. Programming the launch of the cookbook allowed them to delve into questions of how food is written about, remembered and the forms in which it is inherited. Their approach to the cookbook format framed it as a toolkit—where instruction prevails as text to be read, interpreted and implemented unpredictably. Responding to the question “Why food?” Faizal explained, “Nobody makes a recipe the same way as another person. No two visualisations of a recipe can ever be the same, no matter how many times it is materialised as a dish.” Toolkits spur variety, and similar to cooking, art too retains a didacticism that can be circumvented and reappropriated.
Installation shots from the exhibition, at the kitchen table, hosted at 1ShanthiRoad, Bengaluru.
Scouting for cookbooks broadened into a search for artworks addressing similar themes within the smorgasbord of food. This opened up the possibility of working with an exhibition format that could bring together books and artworks. Faizal and Subramanian began wishlisting works and people that they wanted as part of the show. A necessary consideration to account for was the nature of the pandemic and the detriment it could pose to the logistics of working with physical artworks from across the world. “Everything comes to us as a file,” says Faizal, and true to that imagination, they began thinking of how the artworks could be (re)presented by their documentary forms.
Left: Les Dîners de Gala by Salvador Dali and The Kitchen by Olafur Eliasson were two of the cookbooks shown as part of the display.
Right: “Writing Recipes,” a work by Rajyashri Goody is a series of booklets tracing Dalit writers’ memories of food in text. For this exhibition, the artist presented a selection of these booklets, alongside their source literature.
With the processual document as its curatorial pivot, at the kitchen table manifested propositions for artmaking by formulating a critique around the role of food as a catalyst. The artists invited to participate expanded upon the idea of what a document could be, where each work on display offered new realisations of mediatic forms and materialities. The exhibition highlighted a rich inter-referentiality across the twenty-six works that encompassed a selection of cookbooks, artworks and videos. These presented a collectivity of conceptual engagements across practices, a gathering invested in relationships that form over time.
nonfood is an algae-based food company addressing sustainability in the human food chain. For this exhibition, nonfood presented their entire email newsletter campaign archive, from 2017 onwards, tracing the history of the company, their products and ideology.
“The Real Taste of India,” is a work by Chinar Shah and Nihaal Faizal that follows the manner in which various Taste of India restaurants, existing in different parts of the world, offer a homogenisation of national identity and the commercialisation of culture. The work was as a compilation of printed homepages of “Taste of India Restaurants,” a photograph of the artists outside one such restaurant in Mumbai, and free coupons for a cold coffee at a local Taste of India restaurant.
Some of the cookbooks on display—Five Go Feasting by Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes, Les Dîners de Gala by Salvador Dali—used food as a lens with different magnifications, expressing geographical and sociocultural distance. Candace Lin’s multisensorial banquet-performance “Subtleties and Warnings: Power and the Edible Grotesque” (2014) was presented as a bound album, comprising a set of photographs with a transcription of the text that she recited before serving each course. The chosen format referenced commemorative practices in Bengaluru and India. The work sited a process of production where image and text were aligned as processual accompaniments, activating specific intentionalities of the making of a document.
The “source” is a veiled originary but is also identifiably a potent residual element in many of the works. Rajyashri Goody’s “Writing Recipes” extracts memories of food from Dalit writing to constitute semi-instructional poetry. With “Imagined Menu,” the character of Leone Contini’s great-uncle is compiled through his diaries and the memories of recipes in them—that were shared by his co-prisoners in Germany and Austro-Hungary. In a conversation, Subramanian points out that the video works by Carolyn Lazard, Gavati and Pushpamala N—each displayed on a different type of screen—are actually present as artworks in their final forms. She mentions how the gestural qualities in each of these videos executed their subversions and resistances with startling clarity.
"Rashtriy Kheer and Desiy Salad" by Pushpamala N. is a playful and ironic look at the modern Indian family as it imagined itself soon after independence. The film uses excerpts from the 1950s and 1960s recipe notebooks of the artist’s mother and mother-in-law, to create a montage of text, visuals and music of a Lt. Colonel, his heavily pregnant wife and schoolgoing son.
The video work by Gavati is modelled after a regional Marathi cooking show, Sushila’s Kitchen, presents an episode in which the host—a Maharashtrian Brahmin woman—prepares a Dalit beef recipe, minus the beef.
Through routes of anthropology, politics, labour and memory, the premise of food offered multiple points of entry. Many visitors returned to spend time with the cookbooks as well as other durational works. The display mapped the gallery space as a marker—a starting point of sorts—to which things, people, ideas and concepts could continually return. at the kitchen table hopes to travel to new contexts, sites and venues, including a culminatory publication, angled towards what is hopefully an ever-expanding concept-led growth. Akin to the manner in which a kitchen table eternally beckons and convenes; the invitation to gather—creatively, discursively, poignantly, hungrily—persists at the heart of Reliable Copy’s inaugural curatorial effort.
All images from the exhibtion at the kitchen table. Bengaluru, 2021. Images courtesy of Reliable Copy.
