Food, Art and Migration
Dorota Podlaska, ‘The alley of Vietnamese bars’, from the cycle: The Last Sunday (2011, acrylic on canvas, 18x102cm).
‘FOOD, ART AND MIGRATION’
Webinar on Wednesday 16 November 2022, 4-5.30 pm (UK time),
hosted by the 'Food & Drink Cultures' theme of Warwick University's Food GRP
Dr Agata Stronciwilk
Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art Studies at University of Silesia in Katowice and Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice (Poland)
Moderated by Beat Kümin (History)
With a significant increase in the number of food-related artworks in contemporary art, the issue of migration arguably becomes one of the most prevalent motifs. As Steffan Igor Ayora- Diaz mentions “food not only is meaningful but also has a close relationship to people’s sense of identity and belonging, and thus, political importance” (Ayora-Diaz, 2021). In various artistic projects, food and taste become a way to speak about foreignness, domesticity, hospitality but also about the antagonism between the local and migrant communities. Artists from diverse cultural backgrounds engage in the dialogue about the relationship between food and identity in the globalized world. This webinar lecture discusses different case studies of food-related art projects - the works by Michael Rakowitz, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Dagna Jakubowska, and Dorota Podlaska. In each of these examples, the (in)visibility of migrant cuisines in the public sphere can be interpreted as an ethical and political issue. One of the critical problems that can be addressed in those projects is whether such culinary encounters contribute to the understanding and visibility of migrant communities.
Dr Agata Stronciwilk is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art Studies at University of Silesia in Katowice and Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice (Poland). She graduated from Interfaculty Individual Studies in Humanities, where she studied Art History, Cultural Studies, and Philosophy. She gave guest lectures at Turku University (Finland) and Kathmandu University (Nepal). As a participant in the Transform4Europe project, she taught at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski (Bulgaria) in the summer semester of 2021-22. She was awarded a Fulbright Slavic Award for the year 2022/2023
(University of Washington, Seattle).
In her research, she concentrates on motifs connected with food in contemporary art, especially on issues relating to migration, power, and gender. She is particularly interested in Central and Eastern European art. Currently her research
also focuses on cannibalistic metaphors in contemporary art.
Photo: Łukasz Kolewiński
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