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.
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.
In her book Fade, author Ryoko Sekiguchi examines a notion that has long been associated with cuisines unfamiliar to us. She shows that when we describe a food as "bland," we reveal less about the cuisine we are judging than about the limits of our own perception. From this observation, and without lapsing into the kind of fatalism that suggests "we can never truly understand," or that such understanding is "reserved for connoisseurs," Sekiguchi offers a hopeful perspective: to truly grasp a cuisine, we must first unlearn our own culinary "grammar" and approach it with the humility, but also the optimism, of someone learning an unfamiliar language.
「多くの物事と同様に、味や料理も、一度味わっただけで判断できるものではない（……）。新しい味や調理法、それまで知らなかった味の組み合わせ等に初めて出会うと、人はいつも戸惑ってしまう。それを表現する言葉が見つからないのだ。」著書『Fade(味気ない)』の中で、作家の関口涼子は、長い間、馴染みのない料理と結びつけられてきたこの概念に注目し、ある食べ物を「味気ない」と評することが、評価対象の料理そのものについてではなく、むしろ私たち自身の限界について物語っていることを明らかにします。この事実を踏まえ、「理解できない」とか「通だけのもの」といった一種の宿命論に陥ることなく、著者は希望に満ちた展望を提示します。ある料理の本質を捉えるためには、私たち自身の食の「文法」から脱却し、未知の言語を学ぶ者の持つ謙虚さ そして希望 を持って歩みを進める必要があるのです。
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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, Words Eat Café Mizuumi invites visitors to slow down and savor language, one word at a time.
Neurodivergent Pickling proposes to invite neurodivergent gestures into the exhibition space. The process of making Persian pickles [Shoori شوری] turns into an endurance performance. This performance offers a reflection on culture and rituals. It points to cooking as a way to remain connected to one’s cultural roots and to the culture minoritarian individuals co-create - through the reinvention of pickle making as a neurodivergent ritual.
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.
The Invisible Dog (New York) and BUoY Arts Center (Tokyo) are launching a call to artists for NAFAS, a Tokyo month-long festival in September 2026 where art and food share the same table, and where audiences are invited to savor multiple artistic propositions.
Self-taught pastry artist, Andrea Sham approaches culinary creation like an artist composing her canvas: first comes inspiration and imagination, then comes ornamented shapes and soft, sour colors. recognizable at first glance, andrea sham’s ultra-aesthetic cakes are like poetic gourmet compositions. Deeply inspired by the beauty and potential of nature, Sham’s creations are as good as they are beautiful.
Autophagies (Stories of bananas, rice, tomatoes, peanuts, palm trees. And fruit, sugar, chocolate) is a show halfway between theatre and group tasting session. Eva Doumbia plays the role of a master of ceremonies who invites the audience to a "documentary eucharist" orchestrated by the chef Alexandre Bella Ola.
An individual farm-to-table meal featuring seasonal foods prepared by Swedish artist and architect Frida Foberg, served at her installation “Never Alone”. The guest will be seated by half of a table in-front of a mirror, where they will be served a light yet vibrant 3 course meal to be enjoyed in solitude. The meal takes place during the NAFAS festival, and other visitors are likely to be present at the time of the event.
The cuisine is influenced by Frida’s Scandinavian roots. She works closely with regional and local organic farms, and builds the menu based on what is harvested at the time of the event. Guests can expect the three courses to feature seasonal produce and products, where vegetables are the majority of the meal.
This performance dinner is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
Fruit Scores is a study on transience, delight, improvisation, decay, and nourishment. Living as a rapidly evolving composition and visual/performance art piece, Fruit Scores takes a closer look at the anatomy of fruit and musical interpretation of that anatomy. Defining characteristics of each fruit can be viewed not only as art and food, but also as rules and instructions, communicating textural + tonal expression depending on the specific features of each fruit.
This concert is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
A special evening, at sunset, with cocktails and leaked recipes.
This event, presented in partnership with Books Are Magic is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
HaYom and Wandel are two Brooklyn-based companies and they celebrate and reinterpret traditions and heritage.
This event is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
The Japanese Gesture Archive - Tea Ceremony explores the relationships between individuality and formality through the Japanese Tea Ceremony. The gestures and elements in the Japanese Tea Ceremony will be remixed as choreographic material to recreate our current Tea Ceremony, assessing the meanings of each gesture and the act of offering and receiving.
This dance performance is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
A pop-up book workshop by Sherry Muyuan He where people learn to assemble a paper Bánh mì. The ingredients will be printed on paper and ready at the workshop.
This workshop is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
Food has always inspired movie directors and artists. Marco Ferreri, Prune Nourry and Jan Švankmajer are our guests of honor for this exceptional and unique movie night
The Club Bijou Cinema night presented in partnership with Villa Albertine, is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
The senses are a crucial aspect of great literature - and nothing is more powerfully sense-evoking than food, which moves beyond taste and into the realms of smell, texture, sight, and sound. Food is especially potent in writing because it is also the crucial sensory aspect of memory. Garth Greenwell, Raven Leilani, Sanaë Lemoine and Brandon Taylor, are sensualists in the best sense of the word, and they use food brilliantly in their writing. Adam Dalva brings them to the communal table.
This event is presented in partnership with Books Are Magic is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including a group exhibition of 35 visual artists and a series of performances and events to open on September 10, 2022, for the launch of our 14th season and running until October 15, 2022.
Brooklyn-based artist William Mullan invites you for a presentation on the apple’s history, from it's Miocene-beginning to its historical intersections with migration, capitalism, and culture. The presentation will feature a tasting of dozens of rare and odd apples.
This tasting event, presented in partnership with MOFAD, is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
Neurodivergent Pickling is an ephemeral installation, a ritual, and an endurance performance. Over the span of several hours, two neurodivergent performers obsessively wash, cut, and line up vegetables until the floor is filled with them, before turning them into pickles. The piece proposes to invite neurodivergent gestures into the realm of food. The process of making Persian pickles [Shoori شوری] turns into a framed fractal motion, offering a reflection on culture and rituals.
This performance, presented in partnership with MOFAD, is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
A restaurant is like a theater, it has a backstage, actors, dancers, staging, even its own music. A great restaurant is a space that surpasses the everyday: governed by its own rhythms and codes, populated by devotees, dominated by the figure and the voice of a father who, having once dreamed of a career on the stage, instead built his life around this Tower, the restaurant Tour D'argent in Paris.
This performance is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
A live performance of a couple having dinner. Their food will be served on people wearing food masks, and the performance will culminate with the diners wearing food masks themselves while “dining in.”
This performance is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
The opening reception hors d'oeuvres is featuring an eclectic arrangement of world arthropods for you to taste. You have been eating bugs your whole life. Maybe as an adventurous child you tried an ant and found it to be delightfully sour. Most of the bugs you eat, you have no idea about.
This culinary event is part of NAFAS, a five-week festival including an exhibition of 36 visual artists and a series of performances and events celebrating the union of food and art.
Learn about the Nafas artists, their work and their stories.
[…] Great art should involve food, I feel, because the gustatory moments of our lives are aligned with both desire and the thwarting of desire. Food is also the crucial sensory aspect of memory. Think of the chocolate you ate right before you decided to leave your lover; the childhood sandwich that your cruel babysitter prepared; the last meal you ever ate with a dead loved one. The memory is locked in by what we consumed during the memory. In the case of the lead of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, of course, a humble madeleine thrusts the lead back into a 3000-page reverie. It’s not that the madeleine itself is particularly remarkable—it’s what it’s associated with, redolent of childhood walks, a beloved grandmother, and the most shameful of secrets. […]
This essay is about NAFAS, a new exhibition about Food from September 10 to October 15, 2022
The Invisible Dog Art Center (Brooklyn NY) is thrilled to present Nafas, an exhibition gathering 36 visual artists who are working with and around the theme of food. Nafas is also a five-week festival of performances and events.
In Arabic, Nafas is a breath or a spirit. But in the context of cooking, nafas is much more than that, “It’s the energy some people possess that makes their meals not only good but exceptional”
In their painting, sculpture, drawing, video, installation, photography, embroidery, writing, cuisine and performance, the artists gathered by Lucien Zayan, director of The Invisible Dog, bring this indefinable breath that makes their art exceptional.
