During Covid-19, our homes have been forcefully transformed into multipurpose spaces, where the intimate and the professional intersect, for better or worse. As we remain homebound, our domestic skills flourish, our agility at leaping between the real and the virtual is heightened, and our ways of finding sociability and connection have become novel and resourceful.

Our online series, Lentil Space, is a program of cooking sessions with artists, re-making the private into a shared public space, and an opportunity to peer into each other’s homes and habits. These sessions will try to reconnect us with the sensuousness and intimacy of cooking together, and also transform ways of making and narrating that are usually confined to the domestic into moments of performance and community.

Once a month, an invited artist, couple, or collective will welcome us into their kitchen, sharing a recipe of their choosing, but also their stories, knowledge, skills, music, texts: glimpses into their practice and their sensory universe, culinary and otherwise.

Episode #1: Nadah El Shazly

Thursday, April 15, 2021, at 9:30pm Athens/8:30pm Brussels

Nadah El Shazly (Egypt, b. 1989) is a producer, vocalist, and sound artist. Her debut album Ahwar both radically reinvents the popular music of her homeland from the early 19th century and explores new sonic and harmonic frontiers. Using voice, field recordings, and instruments, she creates haunting sound pieces and song forms that hijack your perception of time with their complex layers and dynamic structure. Backing up her release with extensive worldwide touring with a solo set and a four-piece band, Nadah has been featured in local and international festivals including Le Guess Who?, REWIRE, Best Kept Secret, Nusasonic, Marfa Myths, and many more. She continues to compose for film and visual art.

Episode #2: Meriem Bennani

Thursday, May 6, 2021 at 8:30pm Brussels/Cairo, 9:30pm Athens/Ramallah

Meriem Bennani (Morocco, b. 1988) lives and works in Brooklyn. Juxtaposing and mixing the language of reality TV, documentaries, phone footage, animation, and high production aesthetics, she explores the potential of storytelling while amplifying reality through a strategy of magical realism and humor. She has been developing a shape-shifting practice of films, sculptures, and immersive installations, composed with a subtle agility to question our contemporary society and its fractured identities, gender issues, and ubiquitous dominance of digital technologies. Meriem’s work has been shown at the Whitney Biennale, MoMA PS1, Art Dubai, the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, Public Art Fund, CLEARING, and The Kitchen in New York.

Episode #3: Reem Shadid

Thursday, June 3, 2021 at 8:30pm Brussels/Cairo, 9:30pm Athens/Ramallah

Reem Shadid is a cultural organizer, researcher and curator. She is the producer and host of Radio alHara’s show Listening with Reem Shadid, monthly listening sessions with artists, researchers, and curators working at the intersection of sonic, visual, and literary productions. She is also a contributing editor at Infrasonica, a digital platform of non-Western cultures. Her research is at the intersection of socio-economic form and the imaginary and emancipatory possibilities of artistic practice. Previously, she was the deputy director of Sharjah Art Foundation, where she served in various capacities, focusing mainly on organizing, managing, and producing the Sharjah Biennial between 2006 and 2020. She is currently in residence at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut.

Episode #4: Urok Shirhan
Thursday 7 October, 2021 at 7pm Brussels/Cairo, 8pm Athens

Urok Shirhan (b. 1984, Baghdad) is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of performance, visual arts, and critical theory. Her practice explores the politics and poetics of sound, image, and speech in relation to power and affect. Urok’s latest body of research considers the role of sound in relation to forms of collectivity, dissidence, and belonging.

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