Sour Things

Sour is the tang of citrus and of fermentation that makes our mouths pucker with delight, but for Lisbon-based Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh, sour is also the sharp taste of grief and loss. Fermentation, to Bamieh, is first and foremost transformative. It is one of the oldest food preservation techniques, stretching back millennia across cultures. Bamieh honours these ancient and global food traditions but also roots her multi-disciplinary practice in the geopolitical reality of Palestine, where food heritage, heirloom plants, memory, and place are under continuous threat of erasure. For Bamieh, fermentation connotes possibility: it tricks time and prolongs the life cycle of produce beyond its expiry date; it facilitates nonhuman ecologies by growing beneficial bacteria and enzymes; it changes flavours, textures, and forms. Sourness and fermentation are life forces and in Bamieh’s artistic practice, they become method.

At the heart of the exhibition is the artist’s ongoing project Sour Things, from which the show borrows its title. Here, Bamieh zooms in on the pantry, an essential and forward-looking space in the home, intended to provide sustenance during times of scarcity and seasonal shortages. The pantry encapsulates a contradictory sensibility. On the one hand, it proffers resilience and the conviction that times of hardship will be overcome. On the other, it anticipates catastrophe. Bamieh’s multi-media installation Sour Things: The Pantry (2024) tilts more towards the latter. Her pantry holds no shelfs filled with preserves or other comestibles, rather it is a space devoid of actual food.

Much of the work in the exhibition seems joyous and playful at first glance, only to turn visceral when seen up close. In a series of ceramic wall pieces, Grieving in Colours (2024), a batch of gloopy oranges is glazed in a variety of colours. Rot and mould have set in and the individual fruit dissolves into one citrusy mess. The pieces are gorgeously lush and absolutely disconcerting at the same time. The artist often speaks of how her work addresses collective experiences. In this particular work the singular orange stands for the whole, the whole for a singular orange. The port city of Jaffa, where Bamieh’s paternal family originally hails from, is most commonly associated with the export of citrus. Oranges are highly iconographic in Palestinian visual art and literature, indicating a strong agricultural connection to the land and, following the Nakba, the severance of this bond.

A similar sentiment can be found in Sour Cords (2024), a series of suspended ceramic objects. Sun-drying is, like fermentation, an age-old practice of food preservation. Here the artist has strung together giant ceramic chili peppers, okra, garlic, and cloves. Known for their medicinal and favourable properties—anti-inflammatory for garlic and chili; cloves for good luck and prosperity—there is an aspect of (self-)healing to this work. Food is as strongly political, as it is personal, which can be seen in the self-referential introduction of okra: bamieh means okra in Arabic. Each colourful larger-than-life sculpture is, in fact, a morsel of grief, an outrage, a witness, a story, and a thin sliver of hope. Some chilis and okras are decorated with childlike drawings of suns, stick men, flowers, and blocky houses, all referring to family and home. Others show huge eyes—eyewitnesses, with multiple fingers protruding from them, rising as towers, as if they were offering some sort of talismanic protection against the ongoing brutality in Palestine, or for that matter, elsewhere. Colossal bulbs of garlic feature an ominous text by the late Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s national poet: “You will be forgotten as if you never existed.” These ceramic objects exude so much pain and trauma, and yet their grotesque size and vibrant presence refuse any form of retreat. The artist finds defiance, solace, and ultimately, a horizon, in food.

Nat Muller - writer, an independent curator