SUPPLY CHAIN INDIGESTION

Supply Chain Indigestion looks into the intersections between eating practices, food production, and power relations. The exhibition brings together the political histories of the kiwi fruit and the baguette, and investigates how these foods encapsulate the complex networks of globalised capitalism. The works "AKIN TASTE SERVED OVERSEAS" by Tian Guoxin and "Pain de Fantasie" Hannah O’Flynn with Kari Leigh Rosenfeld look at our constant entanglement in systems of exploitation, observing how the everyday objects that surround us have been made available through transoceanic commercial operations, long histories of colonisation and continuing environmental exploitation. They question the power dynamics behind this fruit having been taken from its habitual environment, globally circulated, and then returned to be sold back under a new identity. Or, how the charged symbolism given to bread has played an overlooked role in the destruction of cultures and environments.

The visitors enter the exhibition as if being swallowed into the digestive system that slowly breaks down the history of these food products. In the stomach, the relations held within these foodstuff, often hard to grasp due to the immense geographical distances that they travel, become more palpable. Half way below ground, somewhere between root and stem, the layers of meaning imprinted in the food we ingest begin to become more discernible, mapping out the supply chains of exploitation.