DÉJÀ VU

The lunch unfolded as a private gathering for the Alserkal team and community, celebrating The Kitchen as Studio residency, inaugurated by Ahlan Club in collaboration with the Alserkal Arts Foundation. Conceived in response to Déjà vu, Alserkal’s multi-gallery exhibition, the lunch approached the exhibition’s curatorial text as a site of translation: not simply a text to be interpreted, but a language to be entered, unsettled, and tasted.

The process of arriving at the menu became a translatory practice imposed onto language itself, moving between the written and the spoken, the legible and the felt, the language of the exhibition and the Arabic held within it. It sought to find the Arabic stuck in the throat of English: the words, meanings, and sensibilities that resist direct translation, linger beneath the surface, or remain suspended between languages. From this friction, the menu emerged as an afterlife of the curatorial text, carrying its ideas beyond the page and into matter, flavour, texture, and gesture. The text was not merely translated into dishes; it was reimagined as a sequence of courses, each offering a different way of encountering, inhabiting, and digesting its language.

As the menu moved from text to table, translation became a shared, embodied act. The courses shaped not only how the exhibition could be tasted, but also how those gathered might engage with one another: through serving, eating, lingering, and exchanging. The lunch became an extension of the residency’s inquiry into the kitchen as a site of artistic production, where language could be metabolised into food, curatorial thought could take on a material life, and a text could continue to unfold through the collective experience of a meal.