Substitution: a Meal stirs up the interplay between adaptation and improvisation as cooks make substitutions. Serving a menu that offers a dish from each artist, the resulting meal represents the different ways substitution can be impelled by various conditions including health concerns (heart health, diabetes, allergies, food fads), scarcity (war, poverty), unavailability of ingredients (impact of settler colonialism on food ways, migration across ecological zones), access to food sources (COVID lockdowns), and ethical concerns (vegan). The event prompts a critical examination of how substitutions, whether driven by necessity or choice, shape our understanding of sustenance.
Join us on May 13 at 6pm at Roncesvalles United Church for a meal that creates a unique platform to reflect on and unfurl the many layers that make up food stories. Substitution: a Meal transcends the celebratory to delve into the complexities and nuances of substitutions. We invite attendees to share a meal and together contemplate the profound connections between food and lived experiences.
Substitution: a Meal is presented by Richard Fung, Immony Men, Peter Morin, Lisa Myers, and Dana Prieto.
About the Artists
Richard Fung moved to Toronto in 1973, and much of his work explores the overlaps between Canada and the Caribbean through film. These include investigations into the dynamics of his fourth-generation Chinese Trinidadian family, such as My Mother’s Place (1990), Nang by Nang (2018), Out of the Blue (1991), which revisits the false arrest of a Black Trinidadian Canadian university student, and Dal Puri Diaspora (2012), which retraces the legacy of Indian indentureship through the evolving recipe for West Indian roti.
Immony Mèn is an artist, educator, and community-based researcher. He is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Design at OCAD University. His research focuses on developing a theoretical framework for understanding (specifically Khmer/Cambodian) diasporic experience through media praxis, critical race theory, and various forms of community engagement.
Peter Morin is a grandson of Tahltan Ancestor Artists. Morin’s artistic offerings can be organized around four themes: articulating Land/Knowing, articulating Indigenous Grief/Loss, articulating Community Knowing, and understanding the Creative Agency/Power of the Indigenous body. All of the work is informed by dreams, Ancestors, Family members, sonic territories, Tahltan knowledge, and Performance Art as a Research Methodology. Morin currently holds a tenured appointment in the Faculty of Arts at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
Lisa Myers (b. Oakville, Ontario) is a curator and artist with a keen interest in interdisciplinary collaboration. Her research focuses on contemporary Indigenous art and considers the varied values and functions of elements such as medicine plants and language, sound, and knowledge. Through many media and materials, and by incorporating socially engaged art approaches, her practice examines place, underrepresented histories and futures, and collective forms of knowledge exchange.
Dana Prieto is an Argentine-Canadian artist and educator based in Tkaronto. Her site-responsive work examines our deep relations with colonial structures and infrastructures through a careful attention to the ground, and the different forms of living and dying within it. For over eight years, Dana has worked with ceramic processes and soil-derived materials to reflect on the technologies of containment found in the places where she lives and works: looking at mines, bodies, nests, vessels, institutions, and land.
GTA24 Live & Screening Programme
Greater Toronto Art 2024 (GTA24) showcases 25 intergenerational artists, duos, and collectives from or with a connection to the region. The exhibition is accompanied by a Live Programme, with newly commissioned performances, and a Screening Programme, featuring exclusive film presentations delivered at Paradise Theatre.
See all upcoming events, here.
