'AUGMENTED, DISRUPTIVE TABBOULEH MAKING-UNMAKING' BY DALIA KHALIFE AT TAKEOVER

“Food in performance puts food at the intersection of cultural identities, desire, disgust and other social, psychological and physiological modes of excess. An augmentation and bending of everyday life, this performance addresses cultural relationships to food and how they perform culturally, and a critique on technological times.

This proposal is a durational and, at times, interactive performance involving food preparation, and an extension of Dalia’s recent work incorporating her projected, augmented, hyper-realistic digital avatar, in motion. The performance will feature her physical body preparing a large amount/pile of tabbouleh, one of the most emblematic local dishes, in times of crisis.

Tabbouleh (much like hummus), has made an appearance in Guinness World Records with the world’s largest serving, oscillating between self-fetishization and a contested, appropriated culinary symbol. Through the delicate and poignant act of cutting, dicing, chopping, mincing, and ripping, the choreographed body is in labor. The movements, in their simple mechanics, incorporate micro-aggressions, subtle tensions, and a poetic temporal deconstruction that slows and bends time. Each gesture is performative.

In the background, her avatar will also be in labor, reenacting, performing the food preparation process through pre-recorded movements in a more amplified manner. The avatar will resonate different emotional states through movements, like an amplified resonance. This creates the illusion of watching a woman perform her thoughts, transforming an idyllic, stereotypical kitchen into a psychedelic décor.

As the performance progresses, she will alternate between food preparation and synchronized pauses, dance breaks, small naps, and rest periods. When this occurs, she outsources the work to her digital simulation. This examines the outsourcing of cooking practices, the reliance on automated assistance, robot chefs, mechanized food preparation, and kitchens aids.The food prepared will be either distributed for any passerby or audience member, or donated.

Dalia Khalife is a hybrid; an artist, a scenographer, a multidisciplinary designer, and a dancer. She is currently a professor at the Lebanese American University.

She work intuitively, in an interdisciplinary manner, across installation, site-specific interventions, video, objects, painting and performative gestures to produce situations where viewers occupying the same space produce its meaning. Her practice examines psychophysiological happenings as well as elements of spectacle and play within power structures, social events, and rituals, that manifest as primitive moments of ambiguity and shared vulnerability.”

From 7:30-9:30