YES, CHEF

“The mob that used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only: bread and circuses. ‘I hear that many will perish.’ ‘No doubt, The furnace is huge.’”
— Juvenal, Roman Poet (60–127 CE)

YES, CHEF presented works by 34 artists whose practices explored the connections between food and power by recognizing the ancestral, erotic, and visceral attributes of food. The exhibition traced the objects, hierarchies, and rituals that organized the ways we communed and broke bread together.

Popularized in contemporary culture by dozens of cooking shows, the turn of phrase “Yes, Chef” originated from the French brigade-style kitchen, a direct descendant of the systematic military kitchen. The cheeky usage of the expression in common parlance spoke volumes about our relationship to domination, authority, and violence, particularly the ways in which these themes intersected with desire, consumption, and sustenance.

Food, and more specifically the art of cooking, served as a framework for maintaining and redefining our own identities. Ingredients and special recipes functioned as living memory, tracing the lines of those who came before. Food not only nourished us physically, but also emotionally and spiritually. It was often the keystone in our stories—from the secret ingredients that sustained our communities to the unexpected culinary hybrids that served as proof of our adaptation as we moved, migrated, and survived.

Artists looked to food and cooking to address desire, loss, grief, relocation, consumption, nostalgia, and domination. Many of the works on view held the tension between nurture and violence, or care and consumption, while also spotlighting the broader migrations of foods, traditions, and peoples.

YES, CHEF invited audiences to excavate the power structures and historical narratives inherent in systems of growing, processing, selling, buying, cooking, and eating food. We are what we eat, and YES, CHEF presented a framework through which to savor and digest the complexities of our relationship with food, and the ways in which it intersected with domination, decadence, deliciousness, and decay.

— Zoe Lukov