Tasting Justice: Reading Palm

Elia Nurvista's Reading Palm investigates the circulation and value of palm oil through tasting food and reflecting on short excepts from 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 bodies and ecosystems, those rendered exploitable or disposable within capitalism. This collective digestion transforms palm oil from a colonial commodity into a medium for hospitality and critical dialogue, and the rethinking of global food production, circulation, and consumption.

Reading Palm will be 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 performance, 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, University 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: Reading Palm wilL take place from 2.00pm-4.30pm on Friday 24 October at Block H, Level 3, Room H303, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore. Please arrive at 1.50PM.

Snacks will be available at the event, please let our hosts know if you have any dietary requirements on the day.

Limited capacity, registration required.

To find out more about the events visit Foodartresearch.network

Image: Elia Nurvista, Palm Reading, 2023, KfW Stiftung. Frankfurt am Main. Photo: G. Feirman

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