FOOD: Bigger than the Plate will explore how innovative artists, individuals, communities and organisations are radically re-inventing how we grow, distribute and experience food. Taking visitors on a sensory journey through the food cycle, from compost to table, it poses questions about how the collective choices we make can lead to a more sustainable, just and delicious food future in unexpected and playful ways.
The exhibition falls at a pivotal time where food and our relationship to it are topics of increasing global interest and debate. Featuring over 70 contemporary projects, new commissions and creative collaborations by artists and designers working with chefs, farmers, scientists and local communities, it will be split into four sections: ‘Compost’, ‘Farming’, ‘Trading’ and ‘Eating’. Taking a fresh, experimental and often provocative perspective, projects will present ideas and alternative food futures from gastronomic experiments to creative interventions in farming, with several exhibits physically growing in the gallery space.
Catherine Flood and May Rosenthal Sloan, co-curators of FOOD: Bigger than the Plate at the V&A, said: “Food is one of the most powerful tools through which we shape the world we live in, from how we create society, culture and pleasure to how we determine our relationship with the natural world. In an era of major ecological challenges, fast-changing societies and technological re-invention, now is a crucial moment to ask not just what will we be eating
tomorrow, but what kind of food future do we want? What could it look like? And taste like? Today, a wide range of inspiring creative practitioners are addressing these expansive questions. Putting food at the heart of the museum, this exhibition is an exciting opportunity to bring together some of the best of this work to explore food as rich ground for citizenship, subversion and celebration.”
Catherine Flood and May Rosenthal Sloan, co-curators
Koen Vanmechelen has been invited to present his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project - Planetary Community Chicken
Food, the energy the human animal needs, is an inescapable and collective challenge. If we want to survive, finding new ways to share fair and sustainable food reflecting local and global diversity, is a must. Sharing food is sharing stories, identities, and experiences. It is crossing our boundaries to celebrate our common descent.
This I learned from the chicken. CCPPCC is about two farms, connecting global and local, diversity and productivity.
- Koen Vanmechelen
EXHIBITION FACTS
Food: Bigger than the Plate
18 May - 20 Oct, 2019
Gallery 39 and North Court
Victory and Albert Museum, London (UK)
More information on https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/food
