CHENNAI: With cups of steaming lemony chaiya, simmering fish or beef curry, and crunchy bajjis, the fittingly titled ‘Untitled Kitchen’ is an art installation that invites unassuming strangers to cook and eat together in a common space. While breaking bread, these strangers also break established ideas of kitchens in traditional households, and norms of what art should mean to the beholders’ eye.
Iron cast vessels and spoons turned weapons of change, while the simmer from pots and noise from the cutting board drowned in the exchange of experiences, within a small hut-like space established at the recent Vaanam Art Festival in the city’s Memorial Hall.
A board bearing a vessel’s picture and the message ‘Cooking without Fear’ points to the project’s core — a free and open space to cook and eat. Inspired by social reformer Sahodaran Ayappan’s ‘misrabhojanam’ or inter-caste community feast that was organised in Kerala’s Cherai in 1917, the Untitled Kitchen crafts a temporary utopia in a public space, explains artist Kollam-based artist Vipin Dhanudharan.
“People simply come here to chat or play the guitar. It is an engaging space. Even if you don’t understand the concept, you will surely unlearn something,” he adds. Vipin manages the community kitchen along with Ashif Edayadan, Fahad Ibrahim, Prateesh Clinton, and Thumbi.
Artist and architect Thumbi says that the kitchen in a traditional home is usually reserved for the marginalised, such as women or domestic helpers. “But when an ‘Untitled kitchen’ like this enters a mainstream space (Vaanam exhibition) as an art installation, it is a statement in itself,” Thumbi adds. During its debut in the 2012 Kochi Biennale, the installation was initially christened ‘Sahodaran Kitchen’. Vipin spoke to the participants about ‘misrabhojanam’, anti-caste ideas, and Ayappan. “During the Kochi Biennale, I also randomly walked around daily and asked people for an invitation for sharing a meal at their homes. I would draw their portrait and present it to them in return. I had drawn close 45 portraits with families belonging to different communities in Kochi,” Vipin adds.
Apart from Kochi, the team has also stirred conversations and mapped areas in Ahmedabad, Udaipur, and now, Chennai. As a spur-of-the-moment plan, the team also recently travelled over 300 km from Ahmedabad to Vadodara, with kitchen vessels dangling around their bicycles. They set up kitchens in various places during the journey, and returned with numerous stories after filling the stomachs and hearts of many a villager.
Asked about the response to their installation, Thumbi recalls a visitor at Vaanam who was excited to enter the space as “she was not allowed inside the kitchen in a lot of places. Nobody was judging her here and she could touch, do and eat whatever she wanted.”
What’s in a name
In times when laws ban the consumption of beef, and caste dictates how and who we eat with, an open kitchen is indeed a form of resistance. Speaking about the underlying politics of food and the origin of Untitled Kitchen, the artist explains, “This is like an untitled painting which can be used to connect with the world. An active open space like this is necessary when even curry houses or restaurants are named after castes like Nair Mess or Brahmin Café.”
Unlike their experience at Vaanam, the kitchens this team set up at Gujarat University and parts of Ahmedabad were barred from cooking meat. “In Gujarat and many areas up north, there are chalk drawings of ‘go vegan’ on the walls. They deliberately create a fear of mob lynching in the minds of residents. They are using food to propagate hate politics on the basis of caste. When the governments promote vegetarian diets as part of a nation-building plan, it marginalises certain communities,” he adds.
The artists also expressed concern about various portions of India’s history being erased from school textbooks. They feel these acts are aimed at creating divisions in society and the othering of certain communities. “With art, poetry, books, and activism, we engage with the communities. We need more spaces to talk about science and literature so that people will be able to differentiate between myths and facts. Our temporary utopia may not alter the ground reality, but as they say, a little can go a long way. In the long run, all sections of the society would desire a change and work unitedly towards it,” Vipin says.
Challenging art
With inland letters offering messages to friends and strangers alike, a sculpture of anti-caste leader Narayana Guru retrieved from the sea, and repeated paintings of alarm clocks — Vipin’s art is confined to neither form nor style. “The art flows from the immediate, the ultra-local, and encompasses a vast universe in it, which is simultaneously affective and political. The banal and the everyday, and the bizarre and the transcendental, all interact with each other in Vipin’s discoveries/recoveries,” writes artist and filmmaker Sudha Padmaja Francis. Though Vipin, a self-taught artist, signs off with “I connect with people through art”, the warm smiles on the people sipping black lemony chaiya around him would suggest this to be an understatement.