A Performative Dinner: Hearts of Sugar, Fingers Dipped in Honey

Join the gallery for a performative dinner event in honor of artist Fatemeh Kazemi’s participation in The Bride Has Gone to Pick Flowers, a group exhibition curated by Lila Nazemian at CUE Art. CUE is a nonprofit organization that works with and for emerging and underrecognized artists and art workers to create new opportunities and present varied perspectives in the arts.

The event contemplates the concept of marriage and the myth of the bride—an ever-changing figure shrouded in ritual, desire, and silence. Through food, conversation, and company, the dinner constructs an interface for a sensory, multi-layered, and nonlinear narrative of wedding feasts through the premise of a bride who has left without saying goodbye—and whose departure, like the hierarchies of marriage and the violences nestled within it, is forgotten amidst the sweet haze of familial joy.

The bride, a liminal being suspended between past and future, is often portrayed as an icon of happiness. This symbology, however, often belies feelings of silence, sacrifice, and disappearance. Marriage, wrapped in layers of tradition, can sustain an illusion of safety and celebration for the bride while concealing their quiet endurance when faced with the control embedded in patriarchal legacies that shape both law and ritual in Kazemi’s homeland of Iran, and indeed, throughout the world.

By restaging elements of a traditional Iranian sofreh aghd (wedding spread), dinner guests will consider how rituals evoke the untold stories that have been whispered, tucked beneath pillows, and left unsaid. The feast becomes a shared skin—allowing its participants to have a taste of the depths of the bride’s pleasure and pain. The dinner after the ceremony serves as a beginning and an end, raising many unspoken questions. What happens after the last guest leaves, after the sweets are gone, after the door is closed?

The menu, prepared especially for the evening by Golbarg Jokar of the food collective Bazm and created in collaboration with Kazemi, seeks to recreate personal experiences as well as the historical and cultural nuances of Iran’s many culinary landscapes, and to emphasize the relationship of food to joy, indulgence, festivity—and sometimes, mourning. Together, we will channel the memory and absence of the bride, summoning them in order to better taste, to more closely listen, and to rewrite the sweet myths we have swallowed whole.