Tasting Justice: Singapore
Two days of performance, talks and activations with artists whose work explores the intersection of food, art and politics. Held at LASALLE College of the Arts as a prelude to the publication Tastes of Justice: The Aesthetics and Politics of Food-Art Practices in Asia and Australia.
Tasting Justice: the politics of food in art was two days of performances, talks, activations and workshops with artists whose work explores urgent questions of justice at the intersection of food, art and politics. Together we considered how artists across Asia and Australia use food in their creative practices to address social, political and ecological issues and to rethink the ways we grow, share, and value what and how we eat.
This event is a prelude to our 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.
Thursday 23 October
6.00-7:30pm – Tasting Justice: Artists and Curators Talks
Curators Francis Maravillas, Madeleine Collie, Marnie Badham and Stephen Loo were joined by artists from the program including Elia Nurvista, Keg de Souza and Nathalie Muchamad to discuss the program as a prelude to our forthcoming book.
Friday 24 October
2-4:30pm – Tasting Justice: Reading Palm
This workshop investigates the circulation and value of palm oil through tasting dishes and reading Max Haiven’s Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire (2022), focusing on the chapter “Whose Surplus.” Eating and reading together highlight how palm oil binds surplus bodies, those rendered exploitable or disposable within capitalism. This collective digestion transforms palm oil from a colonial commodity into a medium for hospitality, dialogue, and rethinking global production, value, and consumption.
5:00-7:30pm 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 join 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.
5:00-5:40pm – Nathalie Muchamad I wonder how it tastes like
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 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.
5:45-6:25pm – Keg de Souza Bananas: A Wild Story
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.
6.30-7.30pm – 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.
Tasting Justice is a two day event of food, art and politics held at LASALLE College of the Arts. 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.
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About the artists
Critical Craft Collective
Founded by Adeline Kueh and Hazel Lim, the Critical Craft Collective (CCC) reexamines craft in the 21st century through the lens of contemporary art and technology. The impetus for this collective was precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and our relationship to the home (and the activities around it) as a site of radical domesticity.
Citing historical trajectories of these communal practices, CCC foregrounds elements of storytelling that are embedded in the process of making. It aims to be a platform that enables partnerships, collaborations and curatorial projects, where expanded dialogues and conversations at the intersections of craft, design and contemporary art practices can take place. Working with Singers Rebecca Ashley Dass, Irsyad Dawood, JJ Keat (bios below)
Rebecca Ashley Dass
Rebecca is an actor for theatre, television, film and voiceover work. Her recent productions include Playing With Fire (Checkpoint Theatre), Falling and A Doll’s House; Part 2 (Pangdemonium), The Wizard of Oz and Hotel (Wild Rice), Cat In The Hat and The Three Billy Goat’s Gruff (Singapore Repertory Theatre), just to name a few. Rebecca credits her accomplishments to her friends, family and felines for their unwavering support.
Irsyad Dawood
Irsyad Dawood is a Singaporean theatre-maker, performer, and educator whose work spans across multiple artistic disciplines. His original works merge personal narratives with broader societal themes, while his acting credits include performances with leading theatre companies like Wild Rice and Singapore Repertory Theatre.
JJ Keat
JJ KEAT (b. 1995) is an artist, songwriter and music producer based in Singapore. A former opera singer turned songwriter & music producer, JJ KEAT has amassed a creative portfolio across Singapore, Malaysia, Sweden, Japan & Australia. His artistry is anchored in queer advocacy and empowerment, frequently writing in themes surrounding identity and liberation. He has since released two albums, and is a recent graduate from renowned Swedish songwriting school, Musikmakarna.
Elia Nurvista
Elia Nurvista explores a wide range of art mediums with an interdisciplinary approach and focuses on the discourse on food. Using several mediums from workshop, study group, publication, site specific, performance, video and art installations, she explores the food system to critically scrutinise and address the wider issues such as inequality, ecology, gender, class and geopolitics. In 2015 she initiated Bakudapan food study group, with whom she has conducted research on food within the socio-political-cultural context of South East Asia. She is part of Struggles for Sovereignty, the solidarity platform on Land, Water, Farming, Food which builds lasting solidarity between groups engaged with struggles for the right to self-determination over basic resources. She has been a fellow at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2018-2019) Jan Van Eyck, Maastricht (2021-2022), Institute for Advanced Study, Nantes, France (2023) and Villa Romana, Firenze (2025). See: https://www.elianurvista.com/
Keg de Souza
Keg de Souza is an artist of Goan ancestry who lives on unceded Gadigal land in Sydney. Architecturally trained, she creates social and spatial environments, making reference to her lived experiences with projects that explore plant and food politics, temporary architecture, publishing and radical pedagogy. Themes of displacement filter through her work, sharing (often lesser-known) stories of plants, people and Place. Keg draws from experiences of colonialism and her projects often centre marginalised voices. Keg has made projects for: Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne; South London Gallery; Artspace, Sydney; Setouchi Triennale; Biennale of Sydney; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Auckland Triennial and Jakarta Biennale.Keg holds a PhD from the Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab, Monash University. See: https://www.kegdesouza.com/
Nathalie Muchamad
Nathalie Muchamad was born in Kanaky— New Caledonia—and is now based in Mayotte. Her origins, which are Javanese and Kanaky, begin a line of questioning in her practice around the deconstruction of identity through the quest for historical memory and the notion of the past. Through textile, video, drawing, text, and installation, Muchamad takes an approach of multiplicity in a connected and multipolar world through her situatedness in multiple geographies. She focusses on the role of commodity trade and her own displaced familial background, as entangled with colonisation, indentured labour, and the European slave trade in the Indian and Pacific oceans. under the umbrella of the « Food Art Research Network » she received an honorable mention by Climavore for her research « Breadfruit, a taste of Empire ». Otherwise, her work has been presented in the 2024 Asian Art Biennale: How to Hold Your Breath (Taichung), 2024 Busan Biennale: Seeing in the Dark, 2022 Kochi-Muziris Biennale: In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, and in the Disobedience Archive of the 2022 Istanbul Biennale.
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About the curators
Tastes of Justice Curatorial Collective encompasses different disciplinary art practices (curatorial, socially engaged art, experimental performance, research and writing).
Francis Maravillas is Programme Leader, BA (Hons) Art Histories and Curatorial Practices: Asia and the World, and Senior Lecturer at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore. His research focuses on contemporary art and curating in Asia, exhibition histories, socially engaged and performative practices in art. He is particularly interested in the conjuncture of food, art and politics in a region marked by multiple and overlapping (post-)colonial histories and by processes of globalisation. He was formerly Assistant Professor in the Critical and Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art (CCSCA) program at the National Taipei University of Education Taiwan.
Madeleine Collie is a curator and researcher specializing in plants, ecosystems, food cultures, and transformations within art and culture. She founded the Food Art Research Network (FAR) in 2020, which she continues to develop as an international platform for slow curatorial research. Madeleine is co-editor of Earth Ethics: Art Institutions and Regenerative Practices, Monash University Publishing, 2025 and Visiting Researcher at NTU CCA, Singapore within their Climate Transformation Program.
Marnie Badham has a 30-year history of socially engaged art-research practice in Canada and Australia. Through artistic forms of encounter and exchange, Marnie’s research brings together disparate groups of people in dialogue and creative collaboration to examine and effect local issues. She is Associate Professor in School of Art at RMIT University,
For more than thirty years, Stephen Loo has researched, taught and practiced in the transdisciplinary nexus of architecture, design, philosophy, psychology, performance and science. He has published widely in architecture, biophilosophy, posthumanist ethics, ecological humanities and experimental digital practice. He is currently working on the relations between thinking, justice and the psychophysiology of eating. Loo has served as External Examiner (Design) and Chief External Examiner at LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore.
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