First We Eat.
Potatoes, Krauts and Artist Mukbang.
6 February – 5 March, 2020
Artists:
Julia Gruner & Liza Dieckwisch (Cologne/Düsseldorf, Germany)
Vera Drebusch (Hamburg/Cologne, Germany)
Paddy Bloomer (Belfast, UK)
The Domestic Godless (Cork, Ireland)
First we eat, then we do everything else.
(MFK Fisher)
Food is not only an essential source of energy, but an indispensable aspect of society. We celebrate special events with dinner parties and define our culture through cooking traditions, specific dishes and how they are presented in rituals and table manners. While Vedic culture praises “food as God“ and as connection to our surroundings, it is now undeniable that our modern dietary habits are one of the most significant reasons for the destruction of the planet. Food, its production and even its absence are highly political and concern themes like contamination, globalisation, famine and hunger strikes.
From February 6th until March 5th, 2020, the exhibition First We Eat explored the sensual and social dimensions of food, eating and consumption. First We Eat was set up as a site-specific and participative installation at Catalyst Arts Belfast, bringing together artists from Germany, Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The participating artists invited the visitors to explore the pleasures of taste and cooking, while reconsidering the stories and origins of what we’re eating. In the tradition of the 1960s Eat Art, First We Eat understood the culinary world as an almost endless source of aesthetic phenomenons and social interaction. Together with Julia Gruner & Liza Dieckwisch, Vera Drebusch, Paddy Bloomer and The Domestic Godless, we transformed the gallery space into a kitchen, laboratory and dining hall.
As part of the show, a Catalyst Arts cookbook was published as a collection of unusual recipes and personal food-related stories by the participating artists, Catalyst Arts directors and members.
Curated by Anne Mager
OPENING ON MARCH 5TH, 2020
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Photos: Simon Mills
THE ARTISTS
Paddy Bloomer
is an artist, inventor, explorer and plumber based in Belfast. Previous projects include installations in sewers and derelict factory chimneys, alleyways, waterways, drinking arenas, lamp posts and kebab grills. Paddy is interested in finding and exploiting unusual power sources, waste disposal, health and safety legislation and subverting public infrastructure.
Liza Dieckwisch & Julia Gruner
met each other while studying painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. Since 2015 they have been collaborating on exhibition projects about the boundary between art and everyday food. They create large-scale installations in which parts of the exhibition are edible and aligned with the other materials of the installation such as silicone, latex, plastic or rubber in terms of colour, texture and feel. The perception of the borderline between artificiality and naturalness blurs and visitors become part of the exhibition by literally consuming the artworks.
Vera Drebusch’s
thematic priorities are the interweaving of political events and individual space, the transformation of communication through media, and the expression of surfaces in organic and social systems. The starting point of her practice is the examination of interfaces — boundaries, paths, intersections — in which temporal feedback, non-simultaneities, and heterotopias occur. The aim of her work is the preservation, consolidation, and retranslation of intimate everyday moments in photographs, videos, performances, installations, textiles, and objets trouvés. Her work always involves the visualization of hidden contexts through rearrangement.
The Domestic Godless
have introduced to the world such delights as Sea Urchin Pot Noodle, Foot & Mouth Terrine, Carpaccio of Giant African Land Snail and Victorian high tea wrought from all manner of fertilizer, often in the setting of anarchic installations. The Domestic Godless were founded by artists Stephen Brandes and Mick O’Shea and Irene Murphy under the Cork Artist’s Collective banner at the exhibition Artists/Groups at Project Arts Centre, Dublin in 2003. Since then, it has been their mission to explore the potential of food (its taste, its presentation, its history and its cultural values) as a vehicle for irreverent artistic endeavour and experimentation. Through recipes, installations and public presentations they employ food as both a concept and a medium through which to convey humour, empathy and other qualities that distinguish art from purely craft.