Sour Things. ICA at NYU Shanghai
In Shanghai, through moving images and a diffusion of sound, scent, and light, as well as pieces of in/organic matter scattered about, Sour Things: The Kitchen (2023/24) unfolds as an uncontained psychogeographical space that maps the functions and mechanics of the artist’s “body”—both as an individual and as part of a community—onto the structure and contents of a kitchen. Lemons in various states of transformation rest within glass jars and ceramic bowls; ceramic bodies and body parts, made in collaboration with artisans in China, lie amongst layers of salt. Bamieh expands her body to include the body of the jar, and the body of the jar to include the world. Like the liminal space of the jar expanded into the artist's body and home, perpetually displaced and awaiting, Sour Things: The Kitchen is an eerie, uncanny scene for perpetual becoming, populated by things in between preservation and decay, between movements, between expansion and contraction, between various hues of sour.
Sour Things emerged from a period of introspection, while the artist was “fermenting in quarantine” and was “filling [her] pantry with jars as measures against an uncertain future” when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. While confined to her home and making countless jars of ferments, Bamieh reflected on fermentation as a metaphor, but also as a material process. She began writing a series of texts, combining poetic observations and personal histories with adjacent recipes for fermented vegetables, fruits, beverages, yogurt, and bread. These texts and recipes are presented for reading and sharing on a communal table, which is also the site of fermentation workshops led by local creative practitioners drawing upon related questions of collective care and preservation.
Descending into the basement below The Kitchen, a cellar-like space emerges for storage and retrieval; a space for collecting and recollecting memories and materials. Another haunting soundscape confronts the listener, in which a deep, incessant hunger accompanies Bamieh's negotiation of repetitive quotidian occurrences alongside her sense of a world continually on the verge of collapse. More jars are depicted in drawings and a film, reflecting on rituals of self-protection, preservation, social transformation, regeneration, and what we can learn from bacterial cultures to create communities in times of uncertainty and crisis.
Through Sour Things, fermentation becomes a philosophical analogy for the nature of memory, history, change, time, and co-existence, without losing a sensorial attunement to the very corporeal phenomenon of fermentation itself. Fermentation allows us to preserve things, while it also changes the thing it preserves.
Exhibition Views: Mirna Bamieh. Sour Things. ICA at NYU Shanghai, 19 September–21 December, 2024. PHOTO: Zhu Zhenyu. Courtesy of the ICA at NYU Shanghai.
