Dubai, United Arab Emirates – Sharjah-based artist and chef Moza Almatrooshi has been kneading and shaping bread dough for about two hours, mixing ingredients and molding the dough into curious shapes as passers-by stopped to watch. At the end of the day, the bread is distributed to an eager, if unlikely, audience.
The scene is part of his performance The Alphabetics of the Baker, presented during Art Dubai in March for Chaupal: A Journey through South Asia, which invited more than 10 artists from Asia to explore the place of food in communities, politics , traditions and rituals.
His performance analyzed the physicality of bakers. Each day at the show, she created fresh bread in the shape of what he called an imaginary alphabet.
“When you ask a baker or pastry chef or barista for something, it’s like you’ve put codes into their bodies about how they move around the machines they have in the kitchen or how they use the kneading tools and all that. that,” Almatrooshi told Al Jazeera. “I took those gestures and turned them into shapes, and I’m turning them back into bread.”
In doing so, he sought to spotlight the overlooked people behind the world’s most consumed staple.
“I am very concerned with food and my practice looks at various things, whether it is within the kitchen space, how people move within the kitchen and how they are mechanized, or outside of the kitchen and farm spaces, how the kitchens work. food policies in different communities”, he said. “This performance…started with me watching how people move within the kitchen spaces, particularly the bakers.”
“Bread has these connotations of the body, so making bread for someone who has that profession and then eating it creates this cycle,” Almatrooshi said. “It is also a common denominator since, regardless of class or economic stratum, we all eat bread.
Alphabetics of the Baker was a follow-up to his film, Glaze, which examined sugar and its history as a lucrative business through the slave trade and its addictive and indulgent nature, as well as its ability to mask other flavors. Glaze was shown at Pak Tea House at the 2020 Lahore Biennale.
“To have a service investment right in front of you, to have something that is considered secular or working class in a high art environment, in my experience, makes people quite uncomfortable because you have reversed their gaze,” Almatrooshi said. “Service doesn’t look at you; It’s hidden from you and you just slide your food onto your table and it can be pretty invisible.”
Almatrooshi’s early art focused on space and earth and how they could be markers of change and irreversibility in society. Almatrooshi said that food was a natural transition because it also goes through irreversible processes when it is cooked or mixed.
“I combined the two ideas, but kept looking at spatial politics in food production spaces, such as kitchens, bakeries, restaurants, farms, and natural landscapes,” he said. “The common thread throughout the progression of my practice is the fictional element that I often add and play with, which is based on ancient and contemporary myths of the region.
“Food is not only one of the most important issues in our lives, but also carries historical and symbolic weight across time and geographies.”
Almatrooshi eventually trained as a chef to better explore the substance of the food, as well as its imagery and symbolism.
In her 2018 piece, We Share Bread + Salt at the Glasgow School of Art, she led a two-day workshop with local artists and curators, developing a text and recipe based on an ingredient each participant chose, something they Was it personal or political? them
The result was a simple dish of bread, purple carrot, potatoes, red chilli, saffron and cardamom that was prepared the next day and placed on a tablecloth printed with a poem about bread as the genesis of life.
“This was one of the first cases where I started to find ways to expand my practice socially and involve others in shaping the work,” Almatrooshi said. “Everyone has a familiarity with food. He has the ability to be communicative in many ways regardless of the context.”
Baker’s Alphabets and other works from Almatrooshi’s career play with the notion that food is its own language, one that can transcend politics, social class and cultures. Staple foods like bread and dates often feature in her practice as a symbol of universal community.
In 2019, she created a work called Praise Hiya to explore how livelihood, life, and femininity are often intertwined but underappreciated in modern Middle Eastern history and what can be imagined in the space of erasure, especially within the context of the persistent erasure of female stories in ancient Arabic narratives.
“In the Arabian Peninsula, there were many deities that were held in reverence by the pre-Islamic Arabs, and often these deities were associated with natural events and phenomena,” he explained. “This gives us a clue as to the attunement with nature that the people practiced…but there are few if any accessible records from that time in terms of what rituals were performed etc.
“Praise Hiya plays with the idea of filling that erasure with imagination and carrying out the forgotten rituals to restore our relationship with nature, particularly with vegetation.”
The performance used dates and valuable spices as offerings, looking at how food was used during such rituals and what meaning it held.
Almatrooshi says he plans to continue exploring the physicality of food spaces and has visited dozens of bakers in different communities across the United Arab Emirates.
She is mindful not to gentrify the experience as a middleman, but wants to offer a “special look” into the hidden lives of bakers. Trust, she says, is essential to such interactions, and even though food is a shared experience, cooks behind the scenes can be reserved and hesitant to have their methods scrutinized.
“When you can go in there and watch people move and you can record them, not really for who they are, what their stories are, but for the core humanity of how they move, it’s great,” he said. , dismissing the idea that an artist should tell people’s stories for them.
“There is also some pretty beautiful choreography that happens in these kitchens,” he said. “It’s quite beautiful when you earn that trust.”
