LOCUSTS for tea and a dinner party of flat food may not be things you’d expect to see in a gallery, yet they both feature in a nine-day festival where food is being used as art.
Venues across Liverpool city centre have joined together to create Pasthof – a programme of events that include cake-building and a minimalist banquet.
The mini-festival is the latest in the Taxed series, which aims to bring together Merseyside-based artists, and the public are invited to take part, too.
“It’s from the Liverpool meaning of ‘taxed’ – as in ripped off,” explains the Arena gallery’s Jack Welsh.
“We take things that other artists have done around the world and put our own spin on them.”
Pasthof, which runs from tomorrow to August 1, is inspired by Gasthof, an international symposium held in Frankfurt in 2002, when artists from different countries presented regional specialities to hundreds of guests each evening.
The Liverpool version will start at Red Wire, on Victoria Street, where the gallery will be serving apocalyptic foods to tie in with its new exhibition, Apocalypse Now. Vegetarians and the squeamish will no doubt want to avoid the locusts for a £1 each, despite promises that the “sky prawns” are a better source of protein than beef.
Bluecoat-based artist Sacha Waldron will be inviting the public into her studio on Tuesday, but only on condition they bring food that is flat enough to push under a closed door (booking is essential by emailing sachawaldron@googlemail.com).
“She’s interested in the performance effect of it,” explains Welsh. “You’re not just walking in and there’s the food laid out, you are actually pushing it in before you enter.”
