Tasting Justice: Off the Menu

Join us for Tasting Justice: Off the Menu, an evening of tastes, performances, and song exploring food, memory, cinematic histories and colonial entanglements. Nathalie Muchamad’s I wonder how it tastes like traces the journeys of breadfruit from plantation histories to today’s “superfood” mythologies; Keg de Souza’s Bananas: A Wild Story unpeels the cultural and ecological politics of this everyday fruit through performance and tasting; and the Critical Craft Collective invites audiences to learn to sing the beloved folk song Rasa Sayang (For the love of food)—a participatory singalong celebrating food as a language of care, kinship, and shared heritage across the Nusantara archipelago.

Nathalie Muchamad

I wonder how it tastes like is a performance lecture that moves from Mutiny on the Bounty to the Green Revolution, to reveal how cinema, design, and tourism have romanticized and erased colonial food histories. Breadfruit—once transported to feed enslaved people and today rebranded a “superfood”—embodies a wounded memory. In La Réunion as in all French overseas territories, massive rice imports and monocultural models of the Green Revolution echo these legacies, undermining local crops like cassava, yam, and breadfruit, and raising urgent questions of memory, resilience, and food sovereignty.

Keg de Souza

Bananas: A Wild Story is a performance lecture that explores the banana as a site of cultural, political and ecological entanglement. From colonial plantations to contemporary supermarkets, this everyday fruit reveals a complex story of globalisation, labour exploitation, monoculture and myth-making. A blend of storytelling, critical theory and embodied performance, the lecture unpeels layers of meaning to examine the banana’s role in shaping histories of empire, racial capitalism and consumer desire. Audiences are invited to participate in banana tastings, engaging critically and sensorially with the politics beneath the peel.

Critical Craft Collective

Rasa Sayang (For the love of food)

This participatory art initiative takes the form of a singalong workshop that celebrates food as a love language. Through the beloved song, Rasa Sayang, we will explore the collective experience of singing and listening to a folk song based on different kinds of food. The verses or pantuns in the song are presented to honour their enduring legacy and to reflect on their lasting cultural resonances within Singapore and across the Nusantara archipelago.

Through a process of public pedagogy and participation, the workshop encourages participants to experience how songs and their lyrics have long been part of a wider oral and vernacular tradition. We will embrace the learning of sonic, textual and multilingual narratives in the song as acts of care and kinship – fostering connections and openness to differences through sound and music.

In a round-robin format, participants will gather in groups led by singers Rebecca Ashley Dass, Irsyad Dawood and JJ KEAT to learn about the different food elements in the verses of Rasa Sayang, sharing memories, stories and knowledge in the spirit of recollection and exchange.

An earlier iteration of this singalong was presented in May 2025 as Love Stories: An ode to Singapore’s musical cityscape, commissioned by the Everyday Museum, a public art initiative of the Singapore Art Museum.

___________________

Tasting Justice: Off the Menu is held as part of Tasting Justice: the politics of food in art, a two day event hosted by LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore comprising performances, talks, activations and workshops by artists whose work explores urgent questions of justice through the conjuncture of food, art and politics.

Curated by Francis Maravillas, Madeleine Collie, Marnie Badham and Stephen Loo, the event is a prelude to their forthcoming book Tastes of Justice: The Aesthetics and Politics of Food Art Practices in Asia and Australia . The book reveals the diversity of creative and cultural practices in contemporary food art and performances in and between Asia and Australia. It examines the ways in which these engender new frameworks for understanding the sensuous, affective, social, and material dimensions of the alimentary in art. The book will be published by Routledge at the end of 2025 and this event offers a chance to meet some of the artists whose work is featured in the book.

This event has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, and by the McNally School of Fine Arts, LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore, in collaboration with the CAST research group at RMIT University, Art & Design UNSW and the Food Art Research Network.

Tasting Justice: Off the Menu will take place from 5.00PM - 7.30PM on Friday 24 October at the Amphitheatre space at LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore.

To find out more about the events visit foodartresearch.network

Image: Installation view of Nathalie Muchamad’s Breadfruit, Mutiny and Planetarity, 2024, multimedia installation with prints on wool and cotton, wall drawings, wood, clay, dimensions variable, in the 2024 Asian Art Biennial, "How to Hold Your Breath," at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (NTMoFA), Taichung, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Image courtesy of NTMoFA.

Image: Louise von Panhuys, Pisang in natürlicher Größe, 1812 Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Image:  Critical Craft Collective, Love Stories: An ode to Singapore’s musical cityscape, 2025,  Courtesy of Adeline Kueh