Pudding is dying out. At least it is if the cries of English Heritage are to be believed.
Join us on Friday, 3 April for ‘Endangered Pudding’, exploring memory, preservation and loss of tradition, through food, spoken word, and performance.
‘Endangered Pudding’ seeks to unearth the knowledge which lies between the lines of a recipe, and the words spoken between spoonfuls.
Faye Matloub and Harmanpreet Randahawa respond to the idea of food heritage in danger of being forgotten or overlooked. Inspired by the specificity of endangered puddings, both artists have drawn on their personal relationships to recipes and ingredients to explore the importance of food as a universal, sensory language.
Recipes live and breathe beyond their simple instructions. They are love letters, maps, archives, genealogies, geological surveys, time capsules. They are evolving ‘social entities’, systems of ideas that hold emotion, memory, experience, and culture. Faye will be serving a dish and giving a live reading, and Harman will present an embodied performance, both grounded in their own relationships to food culture and heritage.
‘Endangered Pudding’ asks: Where did these ingredients grow, how were they brought together, and who chopped, peeled and stirred? How much, beyond its taste, is lost if a recipe is never cooked again?
About the Artists
Faye MatloubOpen accordion
Faye is a British-born Iraqi artist and chef based in London. In 2023, she graduated from Central Saint Martins with a degree in Sculpture.
Following her studies, her artistic practice gradually transitioned toward the medium of food. As her work moved beyond the confines of the studio and onto the plate, she began to define this evolving body of work as Edible Mediums.
Edible Mediums encompassed a diverse range of formats, including workshops, community engagement projects, supper clubs, and written work. As a second-generation Iraqi, Faye uses food to engage with different communities, learn from them, and conduct research on the preservation of migrant identity – emphasising the importance of creating accessible language for first and second generation immigrants like herself in a creative context.
To learn more about Faye’s work, click here to visit their Instagram: @intro_jam
Harmanpreet RandhawaOpen accordion
We are delighted that Harmanpreet Randhawa will be joining for April’s Digbeth First Friday, where they will present ‘Atte di Chiri (Sparrow of dough)’.
Harman is an artist and artist-curator working across drawing, performance, sculpture, writing, and curation. Informed by material semiotics, postcolonial thought, and lived experience, their practice gestures toward the limits of dominant Euro-American knowledge systems, particularly the ways these frameworks render other ways of knowing and being irrational or illegible. Attending to the complex relationships between language/words, culture, knowledge, identity, and the body, their work advances a mode of narration that privileges pluralism, abstraction and opacity, resisting linear and readily visible forms of meaning.
Most recently, Harman curated ‘The Hole in the Whole’ at Eastside Projects, a group exhibition featuring Ashkan Sepahvand, Valerie Asiimwe Amani, and Phoebe Collings James. They were previously a Creative-in-Residence at Modern Art Oxford as part of the Boundary Encounters programme. In 2024, Harman was commissioned by Performing Borders to write a creative response to Fierce Festival. Their writing has also appeared in the Art Review Oxford.
To learn more about Harman’s work, click here to visit their Instagram: @h_a_r_m_a_n_art
Access Information
There will be two performances, accurate timings will be confirmed over the coming weeks and shared via this page and our social media channels, as well as within the space on the day.
Grand Union is located up two flights of stairs (40 steps), and we do not have a working lift.
We have a large gender-neutral bathroom on site, with no mobility aids inside.
The two performances will be captioned using a mixture of live and manual captions.
Expect mixed lighting and sound levels within the space.
Wheat flour will be used within the performances.
Please get in touch via email at info@grand-union.org.uk or phone at 0121 643 9079 for any questions or to discuss access further.