Tastes of Justice

Tastes of Justice reveals the diversity of creative and cultural practices in contemporary food art and performances in and between Asia and Australia. It examines the ways in which these engender new frameworks for the sensuous, affective, social, and material dimensions of the alimentary in creative practice. It interleaves scholarly chapters by artists, curators, theorists, and historians with artists' perspectives in the form of visual essays, recipes, and case studies. In doing so, it offers conceptual framings in art and curatorial practice and critical understandings of lived experience, challenging the normative epistemologies that typically operate between aesthetics and politics in food art and performance. The book critically engages with themes including enculturation, diaspora, museology, sustainability, activism, and socially engaged art; it reworks notions of collaboration, correspondence, and commensality in human and more-than-human relations. Tastes of Justice offers its readers unique techniques to attend to invisibilities, inequalities, relationalities, and justice, where the politics of food art is inseparable from its aesthetics - from the way it tastes.

Francis Maravillas is Programme Leader, BA (Hons) Art Histories and Curatorial Practices: Asia and the World, and Senior Lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts, University of the Arts Singapore. Marnie Badham is an Associate Professor, School of Art, RMIT University, Naarm/Melbourne, and a director for Res Artis: Worldwide Network for Artist Residencies. Stephen Loo is Professor of Architecture at the University of Newcastle, Australia and formerly Professor of Interdisciplinary Design at UNSW. Madeleine Collie is a curator, writer, and researcher whose work engages with the politics of plants, poetics, and ecological relations in contemporary art.

1. From Commensality to Cultural Difference: A Critical Introduction 2. The Edible Archive: Performative Repasts and Art History in Singapore 3. Nasi Goreng Diplomacy: Diplomatizing Politicized Rice 4. Strange and Difficult Fruit: Durian as a Marker of Time in Southeast Asian Contemporary Art 5. The Social Kitchen: Art and Collaborative Survival in Indonesia 6. The Taste of Iron: Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue 7. Therapeutic Botany: Plant Medicine in Contemporary Art 8. Boat Noodle Soup Three Ways: Some Notes on Hospitality, Indeterminacy and Cultural Exchange in Food-Art Performance and Social Practice 9. Bakudapan: Please Eat Wildly 10. MMMEEOW: Mapping Migratory Meeals at the Ends of Worlds 11. Mutton Fishing: The Importance of the Ocean for Cultural Continuity 12. The Sensory and the Social: Food, Memory, and Community Engagement in Aftertaste 13. Chew Chew Spit Spit and A Jeepney Ride 14. Following Vegetal Worlds: Towards Expanded Curatorial Methods 15. If a coconut falls: Cultural Reclamation Through Colonial Archives 16. Multispecies Commensality: Sharing a Meal with Fungi, Chickpeas, and Seaweed 17. Putting Your Stomach on the Line: Justice, Vulnerability, and Hospitality in Food Art Praxis 18. A Coda in Recipes for Tasting Justice