Dubai, United Arab Emirates – Sharjah artist and chef Moza Almatrooshi spent about two hours kneading and shaping bread dough, mixing ingredients and shaping the dough into curious shapes as passersby stop to watch. At the end of the day, the bread is handed out to an eager, if unlikely audience.
The scene is part of her performance The Alphabetics of the Baker, staged at Art Dubai in March for Chaupal: A Journey through South Asia, which invited more than 10 artists from Asia to explore the place of food in communities, politics, traditions and exploring rituals.
Her performance looked at the physicality of bakers. Every day at the expo, she created fresh bread in the shape of what she called an imaginary alphabet.
“When you order something from a baker, pastry chef or barista, it’s like you’ve punched the codes into their bodies in how they move around the machines they have in the kitchen or how they use the tools in kneading and all the Others. that,” Almatrooshi told Al Jazeera. “I’ve taken those gestures and derived them into forms, and I’m making bread again.”
In doing so, she sought to shine a spotlight on the overlooked people behind the world’s most-eaten staple.
“I’m very into food and my practice looks at different things, whether it’s in the kitchen space — how people move in the kitchen and how they’re mechanized — or outside of the kitchen and agricultural spaces — how food politics works in different communities ”, she said. “This performance… started when I was watching how people move around in kitchen spaces, particularly bakers.”
“Bread has these connotations of the body, and so to make bread by someone who has that profession and then consume it creates this cycle,” Almatrooshi said. “It is also a common denominator, because regardless of class or economic class, we all eat bread.
Three baskets of bread Almatrooshi made in different shapes (Maghie Ghali/Al Jazeera)
Alphabetics of the Baker was a continuation of her film, Glaze, which explored sugar and its history as a business made lucrative by the slave trade and its addictive, indulgent nature, as well as its ability to mask other tastes. Glaze was featured in Pak Tea House at the 2020 Lahore Biennale.
“To have a reversal of service right in front of you, to have something that’s considered layman or working class in a high art environment, in my experience, makes people quite uncomfortable because you’ve reversed the look,” said Almatroosi. “The wait staff doesn’t look at you; it is hidden from you and just slides your food onto your table and can be quite invisible.
Almatrooshi’s early art focused on space and land and how they could be markers of change and irreversibility in society. Almatrooshi said food was a natural transition because it also undergoes irreversible processes when cooked or mixed.
“I combined the two ideas but kept looking at spatial politics in food production spaces such as kitchens, bakeries, restaurants, farms and natural landscapes,” she said. “The common thread running through the progression of my practice is the fictional element I often add and play with, which is based on both ancient and contemporary myths in the region.
“Food is not only one of the most important themes of our lives, it also has historical and symbolic weight over time and in different regions.”
Almatrooshi eventually trained as a chef to better explore the content of food, as well as its imagery and symbolism.
In her 2018 piece, We Share Bread + Salt at the Glasgow School of Art, she led a two-day workshop with local artists and curators, developing a text and recipe based on an ingredient each participant chose, something that was personal or was political. to them.
The result was a simple dish of bread, purple carrots, potatoes, red pepper, saffron and cardamom that was prepared the next day and placed on a tablecloth on which was printed a poem about bread as the genesis of life.
“This was one of the first instances where I started to find ways to expand my practice socially and involve others to shape the work,” Almatrooshi said. “Everyone is familiar with food. It has the ability to communicate in many ways, regardless of the context.”
Almatrooshi brushing egg wash over her molded bread (Maghie Ghali/Al Jazeera)
Alphabetics of the Baker and other works in Almatrooshi’s career play with the idea that food is its own language, one that can transcend politics, social class and cultures. Staples such as bread and dates often emerge in her practice as a symbol of universal commonality.
In 2019, she created a work called Praise Hiya to look at how livelihood, life and femininity are often intertwined but undervalued in the modern history of the Middle East and what can be thought in the space of erasure, especially in the context of the ongoing erasure of female histories in ancient Arab narratives.
“In the Arabian Peninsula, there were many gods that were revered by pre-Islamic Arabs, and often these gods were associated with natural events and phenomena,” she explained. “This gives us clues about the attunement to nature that humans practiced, … but there are few to no accessible records of that time in terms of what rituals were held, and so on.
“Praise Hiya plays with the idea of filling that erasure with imagination and performing the forgotten rituals to restore our relationship with nature, especially with vegetation.”
The performance used dates and valuable herbs as offerings, looking at how food was used during such rituals and the significance it held.
Almatrooshi makes bread during The Alphabetics of the Baker in Art Dubai (Maghie Ghali/Al Jazeera)
Almatrooshi says she plans to continue exploring the physical aspects of dining spaces and has visited dozens of bakeries in various communities across the United Arab Emirates.
She is aware not to gentrify the experience as a go-between, but wants to offer a “special look” into the hidden lives of bakers. Trust, she says, is essential to such interactions, and while eating is a shared experience, behind-the-scenes chefs can be secretive and hesitant to scrutinize their methods.
“If you can go in and observe how people move and capture them, not really about who they are, what their stories are, but just about the core humanity of how they move, that’s amazing,” she said. , rejecting the idea that an artist should tell people’s stories for them.
“There’s also a really nice choreography that happens in these kitchens,” she said. “It’s pretty nice when you earn that trust.”