Set The Table

About

Set The Table

Deptford X 2021

Katie Surridge, Maria Joranko, Navi Kaur

Curated by Ankita Mukherji, Renee Xinying Zhong, and Yurika Imaseki

16 - 18 July 2021

St. Johns Garden, London (SE8 4EA)

Set The Table explores the connections that three artists - Katie Surridge, Maria Joranko, and Navi Kaur - have with food. Through installations and participatory performances, the project traces how processes of cultivation, preparation, and consumption work to form delicate networks between people and places. Mapping the intersections of food, migration, community, and identity, Set The Table evokes the experience of eating together, providing opportunities to spark complex conversations, whether in consensus or dissensus. Harnessing the power of food to generate visceral, sensorial memories, a wide entry point is created for anyone to join in and engage with themes of intimacy, collectivity, and forming new relationships with people or with the land. Set The Table provides a safe and welcoming space for new bonds to form, even if for a brief moment, between friends, acquaintances, or strangers.

Schedule

Hours ��

16th & 18th July: 1pm - 9pm

17th July: 10am - 9pm

Performances ��

16th July, 6pm:

a storytelling gathering led by Maria Joranko

17th July, 10am:

"The Stone Soup", a cooking performance by Katie Surridge (bring an ingredient to participate!)

About the works

Maria Joranko, Untitled (2021)

Maria Joranko uses food as a metaphor to remember past relationships and sow seeds for new ones. In her work, memories and shared conversations are enshrined in dirt, clay, and edible material, and elements of song, poetry, and storytelling act as guides through the space. She draws on the ephemerality of natural matter to invite meditation, healing, and catharsis. Often working in collaboration with artists and creatives from QTBIPOC communities, here too she features writing by poets Hana Ortiz-Sanchez, Dionne Custer-Edwards, and Carlos Mauricio Rojas, whose words are embedded in isomalt sculptures, memorialised briefly before gradually fading away with the elements. In her opening performance, Maria invites visitors to enter the intimate space she has constructed through the simple and communal acts of sharing fruit and storytelling.

Navi Kaur, Mera Ghar (2021); 30works30days (2019)

Navi Kaur’s practice centres on her bond with her grandparents who immigrated to the United Kingdom in the 1960s and began to grow vegetables on their own allotment of land. In Mera Ghar (2021), Navi intimately documents moments of their daily lives on their field and in their homes, illustrating the ties they built with this new land and with their kin through food. 30works30days (2019), a self-published zine exhibited alongside the video, provides an opportunity to hold the work in one’s hands, turn the pages and savour the relationship between the artist, her grandparents, and the food they share.

Katie Surridge, The Stone Soup (2021)

Katie Surridge presents The Stone Soup (2021), a public cooking performance that creates a collective experience for all to share in. Inspired by depictions of communal cooking in the European folktale of the same name, Katie invites passers-by to collaborate on a dish by contributing individual ingredients, which are then incorporated into a shared meal, creating a web of relationships between strangers and friends alike.