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Talk: Food communities and future thinking with Gayle Chong Kwan
Monday 17th July 2023 , 7:00pm to 8:30pm
Hear from multidisciplinary artist Gayle Chong Kwan, and delve an immersive sensory eating experience exploring art-making and commoning the knowledge systems around food. Explore the rest of the Second Nature programme here.
What can the explorative process of art-making reveal about the ways food moves through our communities and systems?
From installations of sculpture and photography, as well as performances, and workshops, Gayle Chong Kwan has 20 years of experience working with communities ranging from Moravia in Columbia, to Bow Arts’ local neighbourhoods of Bow and Roman Road, to create artwork that re-emphasises the ordinary and everyday products of food and waste.
During this talk, Gayle will share insights into her projects with food and communities at their core. Prepare for an immersive sensory eating experience to engage you in the conversation.
The talk will then be followed by a Q&A, where we will open up the floor to give everyone a chance to pose questions and discuss ideas together.
Pictured Right: Memory Tasting Unit (2004) taking place on Roman Road. Performed at Bow Festival. Credit: Gayle Chong Kwan
This event is part of Second Nature: imagining climate futures, a focused week of events on sustainable practices, reparative habits, and imagining climate futures.
Free (ticketed)
Gayle Chong Kwan is a multidisciplinary British artist whose photographic works, immersive installations and shared sensory events are exhibited internationally, both in galleries and in the public realm. At the core of her practice is an expanded and embodied notion of photographic practice through which she explores simulacra, the sublime and the politics of travel, trade, and waste. Her work develops through historical and contextual research, engagement with communities, in response to the specificity and histories of a site and communities.
Her PhD Doctoral Thesis at the Royal College of Art explores ‘Imaginal Travel; political and ecological positioning as fine art practice’ to provide perspectives and possibilities to observe, model, and contest aspects of political and ecological life that traverse the material and spiritual, modes of interiority and exteriority, and the individual and collective.
She uses techniques of collage, construction, and the creation of mise-en-scene landscapes, sensory experiences, and sculptural pieces to be worn on the body, often made out of detritus, remains, and documentary sources. She often works with people and communities in non-gallery settings, often in the public realm, and engages in research with collections and archives and people’s relationships with them as a focus for her work.
She has made landscapes out of rotting food, transformed a concrete underpass into a cave using 20,000 milk bottles, hosted a sensory banquet for a hundred people in the British Library to taste their collection, created an immersive photographic work in the longest tunnel in London Underground, made quarantine islands from historical images of diseases, and created photographs that people can wear out of the V&A collection.
Access information
The Bow Arts Courtyard has step-free access throughout from street level, including to the accessible toilet, and is service animal friendly. This venue does not have a hearing loop system. Accessible parking is not available on-site but blue badge parking can be found 500m away on Fairfield Road.
The Nunnery Gallery and Cafe have step-free access throughout from street level, including to the accessible toilet, and is service animal friendly. The Bow Arts Courtyard includes access to an accessible toilet. These venues do not have a hearing loop system.
If you have any questions regarding accessibility at this venue or event, would like to make us aware of any access requirements that you have in advance of visiting, or would like this information in an alternate format including Easy Read, please email nunnery@bowarts.com or call 020 8980 7774 (Ext. 3)
Access requirements could include things like providing equipment, services or support (e.g. information in Easy Read, speech to text software, additional 1:1 support), adjusting workshop timings (e.g. more break times), adjustments to the event space (e.g. making sure you have a table near the entrance) or anything else you can think of!
Transport Information
Opening hours: Mon-Friday, 9am to 5pm
Address: Bow Arts Trust, 183 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ
Nearest station(s): Bow Road (District and Hammersmith and City lines) is a 6-minute walk away, and Bow Church (DLR) is a 3-minute walk away.
Bus: 205, 25, 425, A8, D8, 108, 276, 488 and 8 all service the surrounding area.
Bike: Bicycle parking is located at Bow Church Station. The nearest Santander Cycles docking station is at Bow Church Station.
