Faena Festival: The Last Supper

About

Faena Festival: The Last Supper’ to feature seminal works, new commissions, installations, videos, and performances by Sophia Al-Maria, Yael Bartana, Myrlande Constant, Gabriel Chaile, Camille Henrot, Zhang Huan, Christian Jankowski, Jumana Manna, Jillian Mayer, Pedro Neves Marques, Ana Mendieta, The Propeller Group, Emeka Ogboh, Grethell Rasúa, Martha Rosler, Jamilah Sabur, Osías Yanov, Women in the World.

The Faena Festival will explore elaborate upon our shared experiences of  food and spirituality, abundance and sacrifice, indulgence and abstinence, sex and death, archetypal symbolism and contemporary aesthetics.  This Festival wants to take us to church, invites us to break bread together. Taking both the pulpit and the kitchen as its points of departure, the Festival posits that the shared meal or prayer is the crux of social creation and communal connectivity and transformation.

We have at different times turned to food or religion for solace and for healing—the traditions that we have developed around shared meals and shared spiritual experiences are often the bedrock or at the very least the punctuation in our lives.

Art and spirituality have been linked forever— objects have always been made with intention, imbued with symbolism or metaphysical import, and have acquired power and capital from the significance applied to them.

Feasting and fasting, traditions that we have developed around shared meals and shared spiritual experiences, are often the bedrock (or at least the punctuation) of our lives, from the wafer and wine that were the body and the blood, to the ‘bread and circuses’ that marked imperial decadence, to the sanctity of one’s right to a last meal.

We have often turned to religion or food for solace and healing, and this Festival celebrates both iconic and contemporary platforms for connecting and congregating — for sharing experience in the hopes of healing ourselves–  our individual bodies, but also perhaps more radically in the hopes of healingthe collective or national body, the environmental body.