Setting the Table
group exhibition with an
accompanying public program
Who gets to sit at the table? Who sets it, and who clears it away? The table is where decisions get made and meals get shared, yet access to it has never been equal. Setting the Table begins from this ambivalence, treating the table not as a static piece of furniture but as an infrastructure for relation, an object that can include or exclude, or be reimagined as a tool for commoning.
Alongside the Western dining table and its histories of hierarchy and privilege, the exhibition turns to the Sufra, a cloth laid on the floor for communal meals and practised in different forms from the Balkans to Bengal. Against the formality of the dining table, the Sufra holds a horizontality that is at once practical and symbolic. Tied to spiritual and ceremonial life as much as to eating, it becomes a shifting landscape of encounters, a surface that celebrates difference and gap rather than smoothing it over.
The invited artists and collectives meet this premise through their own practices of archiving and making. Tashattot's film POPG CLANC revisits a WhatsApp group founded by online gamers that, through the compounded crises of Lebanon, became a revolutionary cell and a mutual aid network, an act of collective archiving and self-reflection on how solidarity forms and how it falters. Pushing Hands turn an installation into something to be handled, with archives to leaf through and mantou buns to share, carpets unfolding across the floor. Lou Cocody-Valentino works in woven assemblages of recycled plastics and printed fabric, intimate compositions that read as poetic archipelagos, fragmented yet connected, drawn from her upbringing in Martinique and a life lived across cultural geographies. Shif—t* contribute a modular design that can be reconfigured for each gathering, a framework for communal presence that stays open to change.
What holds the works together is not a single object but a multiplicity of gatherings, spread across cloth and screen, textile and shared food. Each asks how we meet one another and how we hold a common space while making room for difference, where what stays opaque between us is not a barrier but the very condition of relation.