Join us at LASALLE College of the Arts for two days of performance, talks, activations and workshops with artists whose work explores the intersection of food, art and politics.

Tasting Justice: the politics of food in art is 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 will consider 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.

Thursday 23 October

6.00-7:30pm – Tasting Justice: Artists and Curators Talks (click the link to register)

Curators Francis Maravillas, Madeleine Collie, Marnie Badham and Stephen Loo will be joined by artists from the program including Elia Nurvista, Keg de Souza, Nathalie Muchamad, and Critical Craft Collective to discuss the program and as a prelude to our forthcoming book Tastes of Justice: The Aesthetics and Politics of Food Art Practices in Australia and Asia (Routledge 2025). 

Friday 24 Oct

2-4:30pm – Tasting Justice: Reading Palm (click the link to register)

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 (click the link to register)

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

5:45-6:25pm – Keg de Souza Bananas: A Wild Story

6.30-7.30pm – Critical Craft Collective Rasa Sayang (For the Love of Food)

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.