The Cookbook of Gestures is an on-going local and global collection of recipes. A recipe is not just a written document. It is the result of a series of past and present innovative and improvised sensory gestures. Women conjure dishes, nimbly incorporating old and new ingredients. Combined, gestures and ingredients create what we call taste. In The Cookbook of Gestures series, I isolate agile motions, create delicate multi-sensory video, and reveal the dance of timeless embodied gestures.
Reframing the act of cooking as a learned, skilled, and embodied practice reveals the power of cooks and undermines the notion of cooking as a “menial art.” Unsung women cooks are key catalysts in the creation of new dynamic foodways. They wield considerable power and control over not just food consumption practices of a household but also the creation of culture itself and the making of history.
- Cookbook of Gestures is selected for 12G and PAAFF’s 4th Annual Contemporary Video Art Exhibition on August 28th, 2022. The Experimental Video Art Exhibition is a platform for South Asian (SA), Southwest Asian, and North African (SWANA) experimental video artists whose work stretches beyond the unconventional. The exhibition features short films that reorient dominant narratives; films that are positioned between what could be and what will be. At Sunday 28 Aug 2022. Tickets.
- Composite photo of a recipe from the Cookbook of Gestures, part of a Group Show entitled Migration and Meaning(s) in Art, Curated by Dr. Deborah Willis, Inaugural Stuart B. Cooper Endowed Chair in Photography, Maryland Institute College of Art, Meyerhoff Gallery. 30 Jan – 15 Mar 2020 (Read a review)
- Read more about the “The exhibition highlighting the power of migrant cooks.” The National, UAE. 6 Dec 2018.
- A Multimedia Cookbook of Gestures, K’ab Gazal (3 video installations) as part of a group show entitled Working Conditions, at Asian Arts Initiative, Philadelphia, PA, 4 Sep – 15 Dec 2018.
- “No Fruit for her Labor: A Multimedia Cookbook of Gestures” by Sarah Khan in Sara Clugage and The Dilettante Army Collective, a fabulous premier issue entitled Summer Fruit, Summer 2018.
