The exhibition, What connects us, is a kind of ‘still frame’, an attempt—without claiming to be comprehensive—to capture contemporary trends in the society-food-art chain.

With the development of human civilisation, food (nutrition) gradually transforms from a natural into a social and cultural phenomenon. To this day, it is a bearer and conduit and exponent of religious, secular, power, political, and economic models, which, in turn, find their visual expression in art. The process is reciprocal: the connections between art and food reflect respective epochs with their cultural constructions, ideologies, visions.

The attention of the artists in the exhibition, What connects us, is largely directed towards the ‘symbolic’ potential of food, to its ability to be a starting point for (critical) observation and analysis of social processes and reflection on their history and present, but also to its possibilities to be a source of inspiration for the development of individual artistic concepts and practices.

What would happen if apple trees could make decisions? What does Modernism have to do with flour milling? In what ways are tea or a lettuce leaf a source of light? What is the connection between food and the deconstruction of language? These are just some of the questions that the invited artists provoke through their works. Other aspects relate to its ‘architecture’ and, more specifically, to the presence of food in the urban environment, to the psychology of eating as a way of life and a status symbol as an element of a given cultural and social identity.

The exhibition presents eight artists, with diverse ideas, concepts and aesthetic approaches, working in different media: painting, photography, video, objects. Food, interpreted in its concrete and abstract manifestations, is what connects them.