Never on Our Plate
A.I.R Gallery + Repair the World
October 20 – November 4, 2016
Alexandra Ben-Abba’s “Always on Our Plate" series grew out of investigations into her personal and national identity as a Jewish-Israeli sympathizing with the Palestinian plight. Through a series of participatory Shabbat dinners the artist brings the realities of conflict to various communities physically removed from places of discord. Her method involves serving culturally specific food on hazardous dinnerware, often broken glass and ceramic plates etched with images of war, that are always difficult to use. Her first two installations featured Middle Eastern cuisine.
Never on our Plate is the third iteration of the artist's "Always on Our Plate" series. Here, she directs her attention towards the international refugee crisis and considers historical and contemporary displacement through interacting with a new set of dinnerware assembled with found materials, scraps, and place settings left over from previous meals. The meal was hosted at A.I.R. Gallery and featured Eastern European cuisine that recalls her own identity as a Jewish descendent of displaced people from Slovakia, Germany, and Lithuania
The subsequent exhibition at Repair the World presents sculptural assemblages of the plates, bowls, utensils, cups and leftovers from her interactive meal. The sculptural assemblages are a new method of display for the artist. While previous exhibitions presented documentation of her series through video and installation of individual objects, or by staging the meal itself, this exhibition presents the transformation of an event into composite sculptures. Much like the “snare-pictures” of Daniel Spoerri, Ben-Abba affixes the remnants of her meals onto boards in exact relationship to their abandonment on the dinner table. In a single object, Ben-Abba is able to loop the experience of discord felt while attempting to share a meal in community, with the experience of loss effectively portrayed by the sculptures of broken and stained dinnerware.
Never on our Plate is the third iteration of the artist's "Always on Our Plate" series. Here, she directs her attention towards the international refugee crisis and considers historical and contemporary displacement through interacting with a new set of dinnerware assembled with found materials, scraps, and place settings left over from previous meals. The meal was hosted at A.I.R. Gallery and featured Eastern European cuisine that recalls her own identity as a Jewish descendent of displaced people from Slovakia, Germany, and Lithuania
The subsequent exhibition at Repair the World presents sculptural assemblages of the plates, bowls, utensils, cups and leftovers from her interactive meal. The sculptural assemblages are a new method of display for the artist. While previous exhibitions presented documentation of her series through video and installation of individual objects, or by staging the meal itself, this exhibition presents the transformation of an event into composite sculptures. Much like the “snare-pictures” of Daniel Spoerri, Ben-Abba affixes the remnants of her meals onto boards in exact relationship to their abandonment on the dinner table. In a single object, Ben-Abba is able to loop the experience of discord felt while attempting to share a meal in community, with the experience of loss effectively portrayed by the sculptures of broken and stained dinnerware.
