Chefs reinvent the rules of art

Food installations, storytelling, AI projections, design — Indian chefs experimenting with performative art is now the new normal

Blue is a shade that rarely finds a berth for itself on the spectrum of ‘food colours’. Sure, we have the now-faddish blue pea flower — known multifariously as Asian pigeon wings or aparajita in India — imparting its cobalt blue hue to everything from dim sum to cocktails, but that’s pretty much it for the eye-soothing colour.

Yet, blue in its most vivid and evocative iteration of indigo finds itself as the axis around which Eeshaan Kashyap’s ongoing Mumbai food art show, Artist Proof, pivots. It sees the New Delhi-based chef and curator embrace his artistic and performative side, experimenting with 22 different materials, including clay, metal, wood, semi-precious stones and paper. Moulding some of them into tableware, these are presented in the form of his much-fêted foodscapes atop indigo blue-dipped bricks.

“The past few years have seen the emergence of the multi-hyphenate, and the acceptability, or inclusiveness, of a more fluid definition of what constitutes art and design. I think Eeshaan is very much a product of this era — where you don’t have to think in silos but can proudly combine different forms of self-expression — food, art, design,” says Maithili Ahluwalia, founder of the lifestyle store Bungalow 8 that has now morphed into The STANDS, which plays host to Artist Proof. “Also, the explosion of a visual narrative culture makes the presentation of food as important as the food itself.”

In the past, it was artists such as Subodh Gupta who gave us a peek into performative art using food as a medium. Most recently, his Cooking The World II installation at the 2022 Venice Biennale had him inviting audiences to partake in a cooking and dining performance inside an open hut fashioned out of his iconic used aluminium utensils. But globally, chefs have been taking this synergy to a whole other level. Think multi-hyphenates such as London-based food artist and chef Tom Wolfe who is best known for his Jackson Pollock-esque food installation performances.

“Every time I’ve visited the Venice Biennale or Salone del Mobile, I’ve seen these great marriages of art, food and performance. I’m especially fascinated with the work of artists such as Subodh Gupta in this interdisciplinary space,” explains Kashyap. “This is why through Artist Proof, I am attempting to not just work in a dynamic way with a plethora of different materials, but also to rid myself of any one bracket of an artist, a stylist or a chef.”

The exhibition — a tighter, more curated exploration of ideas introduced in his debut show in 2022 — meanders along a path that has elements of both fantasy and practicality. For instance, segueing the blue theme is what Kashyap calls his “cracked pot” moment. A room filled with blue ‘Modern Matkas’. Interestingly, it was a negroni that spawned the idea. “I started to look at pots, especially the matka, in a more contemporary form after creating a terracotta-infused negroni I dubbed the matka negroni,” he says.

Artist Proof has “the quality of going from a minimal, Zen-inspired Japanese aesthetic into a space that is maximal with brass and copper pieces. These take the form of vases, furniture, one-off textiles and even the signature matka in the form of a fashionable tote,” adds Ahluwalia.