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Dubai, United Arab Emirates – Sharjah artist and chef Moza Almatrooshi has been kneading and shaping bread dough for about two hours, mixing ingredients and shaping the dough into exotic shapes, with passers-by stopping to watch. By the end of the day, the bread is handed out to the eager, if unlikely, audience.
The scene was part of her performance of “The Baker’s Alphabet,” which was staged for Chaupal in March during Art Dubai: A Journey to South Asia, which featured more than 10 artists from across Asia exploring the role of food in community, politics, tradition and place in the ceremony.
Her performance focuses on the baker’s physicality. Every day at the expo, she makes fresh loaves based on what she calls an imaginary alphabet.
“When you order something from a baker, confectioner or barista, it’s as if you’re putting a code into their body, telling them how to move around a machine in the kitchen, or how to use a tool during kneading. , and all of that,” Almatrooshi told Al Jazeera. “I’ve taken these gestures and translated them into shapes, and I’m remaking them into bread.”
In doing so, she’s trying to spotlight the overlooked people behind the world’s most beloved staple food.
“I’m very concerned with food, and my practice looks at several things, whether it’s within the kitchen space—how people move within it and how they’re mechanized—or outside the kitchen and agricultural space—how food politics plays out in different community,” she said. “This show…starts with me observing how people move within the kitchen space, especially bakers.”
“Bread has these connotations of the body, so having bread made by someone who has that occupation and then eating it creates this cycle,” Almatrooshi said. “It’s also a commonality because we all eat bread, regardless of class or economic class.
The Baker’s Alphabet is a continuation of her film Glaze, which examines sugar and its history as a business that cashed in on the slave trade and its addictive, indulgent nature and ability to mask other tastes rich. Glaze exhibited at Pak Tea House at Lahore Biennale 2020.
“In my experience, serving upside down in front of you, having something perceived as layman or working class in a high art setting, makes people very uncomfortable because you’ve got the eyes upside down,” Almatrooshi said. “Service doesn’t look at you; it’s hidden from you and just slides your food onto your table, and it can be very stealthy.”
Almatrooshi’s early art focused on space and land, and how they became symbols of social change and irreversibility. Almatrooshi says that food is a natural transformation because it also undergoes irreversible processes when it is cooked or mixed together.
“I combined these two ideas, but continued to focus on the spatial politics of food production spaces, such as kitchens, bakeries, restaurants, farms and natural landscapes,” she said. “The thread that runs through the course of my practice is the fictional element that I often add and play with, based on the ancient and contemporary myths of the region.
“Food is not only one of the most important themes in our lives, it has a history and symbolism that spans time and place.”
Almattrooshi eventually trained as a chef to better explore the nature of food and its imagery and symbolism.
In her 2018 piece We Share Bread + Salt at the Glasgow School of Art, she held a two-day workshop with local artists and curators to develop texts and recipes based on ingredients chosen by each participant, which Ingredients are either personal or political to them.
The result was a simple plate of bread, purple carrots, potatoes, paprika, saffron and cardamom prepared the next day, on a tablecloth printed with a poem about bread as the origin of life.
“This was one of the early instances where I started looking for ways to expand my practice socially and involve other people in shaping the work,” says Almatrooshi. “Food is familiar to everyone. It has the ability to communicate in many ways, no matter the context.”
The Baker’s Alphabet and other works in Almatrooshi’s career embrace the concept of food as its own language, one that can transcend politics, social class, and culture. In her practice, staples such as bread and dates often appear as symbols of universal commonality.
In 2019, she created a work titled In Praise of Shia to examine how sustenance, life and femininity are often intertwined yet underappreciated in the modern history of the Middle East, and what can be imagined in erased spaces, especially is to erase the history of women in ancient Arabic narratives in the context of obsession.
“In the Arabian Peninsula, there are many gods worshiped by pre-Islamic Arabs, and these gods are often associated with natural events and phenomena,” she explained. “This tells us about people’s attunement to nature, … but there are very few available records of that era in terms of what rituals were performed and so on.
“The idea of Praise Hiya is to fill that erasure with imagination and perform forgotten rituals to restore our relationship with nature, especially vegetation.”
The performance uses dates and precious spices as offerings, examining how food is used in such rituals and what it means.
Almatrooshi said she plans to continue exploring the materiality of the food space, visiting dozens of bakers in different communities across the United Arab Emirates.
Realizing that her experience as a middleman couldn’t be gentrified, she wanted to offer “an exceptional look” into the hidden lives of bakers. Trust is crucial to this interaction, she says, and while food is a shared experience, the chefs behind the scenes can be tight-lipped, reluctant to subject their methods to scrutiny.
“When you can go in and watch how people move and be able to document it, not really for who they are and what their story is, but for this core humanity of how they move, that’s great,” she said. Refutes the idea that artists should tell stories for people.
“There’s also this really beautiful choreography in these kitchens,” she said. “When you earn that trust, it’s beautiful.”
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