Galleri Brandstrup is delighted to present the upcoming group exhibition, "About Food", opening on Thursday, August 21, at 6 PM. About Food is an exhibition that explores how food shapes identities, communities, and economies, while also revealing its role as a site of inequality, scarcity, and control.
The exhibition will present works by: Marina Abramović, Paola Angelini, Anna Daniell, Elena Engelsen, Erik A. Frandsen, Kjell Erik Killi Olsen, Michael Kvium, Linda Lamignan, Ole Messel, Trine Lise Nedreaas, Elise Storsveen, Kjell Torriset, Øyvind Sørfjordmo, Apichaya Wanthiang
Themes of cultivation and the land are grounded in Ole Messel’s depictions of fields and meadows, their textures charting the slow rhythms of growth. Apichaya Wanthiang turns to the human presence within these cycles, portraying figures gathering and preparing food, suggesting the intimacy of shared labour and knowledge.
The vessels that hold and preserve sustenance appear in Linda Lamignan’s calabashes, objects that carry symbolic weight tied to culture, religion, and the protection of nourishment. Kjell Erik Killi Olsen offers a carved wooden figure of a boy searching for food, a work that speaks to hunger, resilience, and the precariousness of survival, making the darker realities of food’s political power central. Throughout history, food has been withheld, controlled, and weaponized, with starvation imposed deliberately as a means of domination. This continues today in the forced starvation in Gaza, where denial of food functions as a tool of oppression. Marina Abramović’s performative engagement with acts of eating and Michael Kvium’s unsettling images of consumption bring this urgency into focus, confronting the tension between pleasure and deprivation.
For millennia, artists have turned to food as a subject, a material, and a metaphor. In antiquity, depictions of harvests marked the rhythms of daily life. The Renaissance elevated food into allegory, weaving it into portraits, religious narratives, and courtly pageantry. In the seventeenth century, Dutch still lifes transformed imported food into symbols of status and reminders of mortality, revealing the economic and colonial networks that brought them to the table.
By the mid-twentieth century, artists used food to mirror and critique modern life. Feminist artists claimed the kitchen as a site of resistance, using recipes, shared meals, and domestic labour to expose the politics of gender. Elsewhere, performance and conceptual artists began working with food and its processes as an ephemeral medium: cooking, serving, planting, harvesting, and inviting audiences to participate, turning acts of cultivation and consumption into artistic gestures.