A Conversation with Michael Rakowitz and The Kitchen

A program developed in partnership between Kunsten festival des arts, KANAL-Centre Pompidou and CIVA as part of the Free School, The World History of the Commons, curated with Silvia Franceschini and Grégory Castéra.

This event will be held in english and is open to the public.

If "parties always end in the kitchen", it's because we cook much more than just food there. Every Thursday of the festival, two artists or collectives engage in conversation around cooking in the KVS foyer. These meetings are an opportunity to reflect together on the role the kitchen plays in our imagination and in our daily lives: a space where several geographies and stories that we have inherited from the past converge; a space for collective experimentation, sometimes used as a place of meeting and political dissidence; a space for work, spontaneous encounters, transmission and reflection on the future.

Michael Rakowitz is an Iraqi-American artist working at the intersection of problem-solving and troublemaking. His work has appeared in venues worldwide including dOCUMENTA (13), P.S.1, MoMA, MassMOCA, Palais de Tokyo or the Sharjah Biennial 8. He has had solo projects and exhibitions with Creative Time, Tate Modern in London or MCA Chicago among others. He is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including the 2020 Nasher Prize; the 2018 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; and the 2012 Tiffany Foundation Award. From 2019-2020, a survey of Rakowitz’s work travelled from Whitechapel Gallery in London, to Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Torino, to the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai. Rakowitz is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Jane Lombard Gallery, New York; and Barbara Wien Galerie, Berlin; Pi Artworks, Istanbul; and Green Art Gallery, Dubai. He lives and works in Chicago.

The Kitchen is a space in continuous motion, always in the making, formed and operating in Brussels, hosting collective study and research, relating to materials and ideas that attest to the imaginary of the past and present social movements, revolutions and revolts. The current form of the Kitchen is the Kitchen Study, a collective working space situated within the vibrancy of Globe Aroma. The Study addresses the pressing need for memorial justice, to facilitate collective and community driven forms of memory work, knowledge production and circulation through and by artistic research. Our main concern revolves around the preservation of memory, keeping traces of the imagination of displaced and exiled communities. Emphasising care, academic rigour, and departing from a wide diversity of perspectives in the construction of memories, allows for the voices, images, stories, sounds and narratives of different communities to be the driving force of the Kitchen Study.

Thursday 23rd May 2024, 6pm - 7:30pm.

KVS Bol
Rue de Laeken 146
1000 Bruxelles