Cal Stalvig will contribute to NAFAS festival by bringing the ancient and sacred magic of candlelight. Fire has long been at the heart of human social, imaginative, and spiritual life, and candles extend the tradition of the hearth—the place where people gather, share food, tell stories, perform, and find warmth.
Sama Beydoun’s Mother Tongue is an ongoing photo-based project exploring memory, migration, and matriarchy through food. It began as a personal reflection after leaving Lebanon, documenting the relationship between generations of women in her family, and evolved into a broader investigation of transmission within the Lebanese diaspora.
Emmanuel “Gus” Reckel is a baker, educator, and culinary artist who approaches food through wild fermentation, traditional nutrition, and hospitality. For Gus, food isn't just sustenance—it's a hands-on way to bring people together, share stories, and explore plant-based eating.
NAFAS is both exhibition and gathering. Artists from Japan and elsewhere will present new and existing works, while the festival extends beyond the gallery through community-oriented events, performances, cooking classes, film screenings, musical concerts, and conversations.
During NAFAS Tokyo, we invite you to discover the neighborhood, visit cultural events around the city, enjoy restaurants and bars we love …. This page will be in constant evolution, come back often to check new tips!
Join a candle-making workshops at Asahi-so where participants encounter the magic of candlelight, apiculture, and botany while immersed in the perfume of beeswax.
This event happens at Asahi-so, NAFAS venue partner
Omusubi can be a meal or a quick snack. A brand-new omusubi will be born, using flavors and textures connected to Japan, Brazil, and Egypt. This will be a time to make omusubi, eat together, and listen to the stories behind the rice and ingredients.
4.5 Ways of Appreciation by Yu Ohara is a performance that physically explores four approaches to the reception of art through tasting: the Japanese concepts of “鑑賞 kanshō,” “観照 kanshō,” and “賞玩 shōgan,” and the Chinese concept of “品鑑 pinjian.”
Haku Kato is a poet from Kanagawa Prefecture. Kato began working as a poet in August 2025 and published a first collection of poems, Tokyo White Night Flight (fourteen poems), He will read his poems in the BUoY gallery, directed by Thierry Thieû Niang
Join California-based artist Tara de la Garza for a hands-on workshop exploring the creative potential of discarded plastic bags and packaging. Tara’s artistic practice is dedicated to reimagining single-use plastics, transforming everyday waste into objects of beauty and reflection.
《SHIT》 is a workshop in which participants experience a series of steps: excreting, carbonizing the excrement, cooking it, and transforming it into bread, then eating it.
Each guest arrives with two ingredients. From this unexpected collection, the group imagines a menu, cooks, and shares a meal together. Throughout the evening, participants take turns documenting what unfolds, from the first gestures in the kitchen to the conversations and encounters around the table.
On Sundays, artist Mari Katayama likes to bake cookies at home with her daughter.
On this special Sunday, Mari comes to BUoY with her daughter and her own oven, the only one she trusts. Together, they will bake cookies in the café and offer them to the public.
Takenoko Lab is an experimental performance designed around the concepts of bamboo as food, and bamboo woodwind instruments (shō, shakuhachi).This experimental event will allow participants to physically experience the process by which a single bamboo stalk transforms from a bamboo shoot (food) underground, to a musical instrument like the sho or shakuhachi above ground, and finally to sound produced by human breath.
In an age where words are constantly produced, consumed, and forgotten—where endless streams of information and artificial intelligence threaten to overwhelm our own voices, Café Mizuumi to Eat Words invites visitors to slow down and savor language, one word at a time.
Furicha Free Live + Furicha Experience Session is a live performance and participatory workshop inspired by Japan’s traditional foamed-tea culture. Combining the rhythmic sounds and movements of whisking tea with electronic music, projections, and audience participation, the project reimagines the social and sensory traditions of Furicha in contemporary Tokyo.
in partnership with Institut Français du Japon / Villa Kujoyama, we invite artists Hélène Deléan and Clément Caignart for an informal presentation of their current research project N88DL, a speculative fiction that takes shape around the invention, by Momofuku Ando in Osaka in 1958, of instant noodles.
For the final day of NAFAS Tokyo, Julie Dind presents an eleven-hour durational performance exploring food, ritual, time, and collective experience.
Alone at the heart of BUoY’s vast concrete basement—a raw, cavernous space whose material weight seems to hold both silence and memory—the artist’s solitary presence becomes at once fragile and persistent.
In this performance created for NAFAS Tokyo, Wakita Kizuku examines what becomes part of one's being—before, during, and after a meal—through the act of eating.
In this performance created for NAFAS Tokyo, Wakita Kizuku examines what becomes part of one's being—before, during, and after a meal—through the act of eating.
What do we really see when we look at animals in a zoo? Are we observing another species or are we confronting reflections of ourselves? Perhaps the zoo does not simply preserve the past of humanity, but reveals its present, and even hints at its future.
A series of dinners centered on that unavoidable work of American drama, that unstoppable generator of American Mythology, A Streetcar Named Desire. As we ponder the significance of the white-ribbed-tank top, Lucien Chef Ambition will serve dinner, actors will read scenes, and David Levine and Shonni Enelow will lead a discussion.
The Invisible Dog and La MaMa Galleria are thrilled to invite for a conversation with Isaac Mizrahi, Danielle Durchslag & Negin Farsad, as part of JEWESS an exhibition by Danielle Durchslag.
Walk through the exhibition JEWESS alongside artist Danielle Durchslag and curator Lucien Zayan in a special guided tour. They’ll share the stories behind the works — the ideas, the process, the happy accidents. Come curious. Leave inspired.
On the occasion of the exhibition of artists and the collection of The Invisible Dog at Hashimoto Contemporary, Lucien Zayan, Director of The Invisible Dog and Chef at SAM, invites you to a Sunday brunch at La Salle A Manger (SAM) to enjoy new recipes surrounded by The Invisible Dog's art collection.
The Invisible Dog and JBE Books are thrilled to present a conversation for the launch of the english version of “Not Ads Please” by author Rémi Babinet.
Rémi Babinet, a leading figure in advertising, shares a one-of-a-kind take on creative leadership. Founder and Chairman of BETC, he juggles the pressures of business with the sensitivities of art, shaping his company as a creative project in itself rooted in exchange, and everything that flows from it. Each page tries to sneak a bit of wisdom, depth, and mischief into the fast-spinning world of modern communication.
The Invisible Dog and The Scion Project are thrilled to invite you for a special fundraising brunch. On October 27, 2025, Lucien Zayan, founder / Director of The Invisible Dog turns 60! To mark the occasion, Lucien (Chef Ambition) is whipping up a one-of-a-kind brunch to toast this diamond jubilee and raise funds for The Invisible Dog’s 17th season.
The Invisible Dog and Atelier Jolie are thrilled to present a series of works by Mari Katayama and to host a talk with the artist.
The Invisible Dog is proud and thrilled to announce a collaboration at Le Moulin Jaune with choreographer Thierry Thieû Niang.
The Invisible Dog is thrilled to present a series of workshop animated by Halsey Chait at Atelier Jolie
The Invisible Dog and Eat Offbeat are thrilled to welcome Moroccan Chef Rkia for a special Tagine lunch at Atelier Jolie, as part of New York Arab Festival.
Chef Rkia discovered her love for cooking in her mom's kitchen in Rabat, Morocco. She began her professional journey in Qatar, working at the Qatari Ambassador's residence. Then, she travelled and cooked in South Korea, India, France and Thailand.
Dedicated to the legacy of famed Moroccan visual artist and playwright Ahmed Yacoubi, ‘The Alchemist’s Recipes” comes as the closing event of New York Arab Festival this year, presented in partnership with The Invisible Dog at Atelier Jolie, and co-curated by New York based curators and theorists Sozita Goudona, and Adham Hafez.
The Invisible Dog is thrilled to welcome Halsey Chait, guest artists at Atelier Jolie.
For the duration of this residency, a single basement room at Atelier Jolie will be transformed by Halsey Chait into a living, breathing art space—part personal studio, part open workshop, entirely devoted to the alchemical process of creation. Rooted in her practice as a pen and ink artist, the studio becomes a site of deep reflection and expansive, collective imagination.
Algorithmic Perfumery is the world's first AI guided scent creation platform to explore your world of scent. From creating personalized scents, to customizing creations from our in-house Library, to diving deeper into the creative process with a workshop or scent coach session, it's all possible.
This one-time, site-specific sequence of happenings is a tribute to Iranian and Afghan women whose audacious emotions have fueled the force of rebellion through millennia. In three consecutive performance workshops, each two hours long, we will slow down—physically, emotionally, and very, very literally—while continuing to move.
The Invisible Dog is thrilled to welcome Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony. As part of the research for their performance work The Dumps, and as an extension of their Technical Residency at the Center for Performance Research Simone Aughterlony and Jen Rosenblit organize In Our Decline, a symposium aroused by an urgent and necessary un-doing of things – aging, un-worlding, decay, ruination, and collapse.
The Invisible Dog is thrilled to welcome Brandon Woolf, Leonie Bell, and Matt Korahais for a two night event of The Stinking Nose.
“Les racines du coeur” is 2Fik’s first literary project. Written in french, this autofiction in the form of narrative poetry is aimed a teens or/and adults. It deals with uprooting and expatriation, intimate themes for 2Fik. Come meet the artist and have a copy of his book signed on Saturday, February, 22nd at 2p.m. at The Invisible Dog.
The Invisible Dog and Books Are Magic are thrilled to welcome Lux Magazine and Picador for an evening celebrating the works of the late radical feminist writer Andrea Dworkin, with a reissue of three of Dworkin's best-known works: Woman Hating, Pornography, & Right-Wing Women.
The Invisible Dog and Books are Magic are thrilled to welcome Haley Mlotek with her first book No Fault:A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, in conversation with Jazmine Hughes
An intimate and candid account of one of the most romantic and revolutionary of relationships: divorce
As a part of the Collective Threads exhibition and programming, The Invisible Dog is thrilled to welcome curator of the show, Ana Watterson with a fiber knitting workshop, Yarn & Yack. Watterson has been running Yarn & Yack for almost a year at The Invisible Dog and served as part of the inspiration in curating Collective Threads.
As apart of the Collective Threads exhibition and programming, The Invisible Dog is thrilled to welcome Lucy Beizer as she leads a hand quilting workshop.
Come join this hand quilting workshop led by Lucy Beizer where students will make a small hand stitched quilt using pieces of scrap fabric, beads, threads and found objects. Get experimental and bring home your own mini handmade quilt. Some materials will be provided but feel free to bring your own found objects and fibers to play with!
As apart of the Collective Threads exhibition and programming, The Invisible Dog is thrilled to welcome Kate Phillips as she leads an embroidery workshop.
Embroidery is an ancient craft, yet the act of using thread to adorn and transform a surface remains timeless. Throughout history, people have employed thread to convey images and words—whether in the form of monograms, labels, diary or signage. Embroidery can serve as a means of identity, storytelling, or even as an act of resistance. In this workshop, we will explore how this craft and its typographic potential can bring us together to experiment with texture and text.
As apart of the Collective Threads exhibition and programming, The Invisible Dog is thrilled to welcome Layla Klinger for a large scale lacemaking demonstration as well as Katherine Fox-Glassman and her daughter for a bobbin lacemaking demonstration.
As apart of the Collective Threads exhibition and programming, The Invisible Dog is thrilled to welcome Jessie Mordine Young as she leads a weaving workshop.
Let's weave! In this workshop, students will learn the basics of frame loom weaving from warping the loom, to drafting a design, and basic tapestry techniques. Jessie will demonstrate how to work with a variety of experimental materials to create one-of-a-kind weavings. She will also assist students in developing a piece through every step of the textile-making process. A brief presentation of history and inspiration will be given. Students will leave this class with a small wall-hanging or “woven drawing”. This is a beginner workshop, but all skill levels are welcome
Celebrate the holiday season with FAD Market! Join for three festive weekends in December, where you'll discover a rotating selection of over 50 of the region’s most talented makers, designers, and artisanal food brands. Our curated market offers a diverse range of impeccably crafted jewelry, apparel, bath and body care, home décor, handmade food items, and more—perfect for checking off everyone on your holiday list.
Celebrate the holiday season with FAD Market! Join for three festive weekends in December, where you'll discover a rotating selection of over 50 of the region’s most talented makers, designers, and artisanal food brands. Our curated market offers a diverse range of impeccably crafted jewelry, apparel, bath and body care, home décor, handmade food items, and more—perfect for checking off everyone on your holiday list.
Celebrate the holiday season with FAD Market! Join for three festive weekends in December, where you'll discover a rotating selection of over 50 of the region’s most talented makers, designers, and artisanal food brands. Our curated market offers a diverse range of impeccably crafted jewelry, apparel, bath and body care, home décor, handmade food items, and more—perfect for checking off everyone on your holiday list.
The Invisible Dog is thrilled to welcome SUNNYDAY collective for an art market.
The SUNNYDAY collective is made up of a small group of artist friends that like to plan art markets! they are having their last market of 2024 on November 23 and 24 where nearly 100 local artists selling stationery, handmade goods, and more!
