Food as a Living Archive
LAU’s Department of Nutrition and Food Science and the Institute of Art in the Arab World (IAAW) co-hosted a panel discussion titled Food as Art, Memory and Resistance on October 9, 2025, highlighting food as a material and artistic medium.
Moderated by Associate Professor Lama Mattar and IAAW Director Yasmine Nachabe Taan, the discussion brought together artists and scholars to explore how food, beyond its nutritional and symbolic roles, becomes a substance for making, painting and installation, as well as an aesthetic tool that carries memory, ritual and critique.
Through practices spanning edible installations, bread engravings, salt sculptures and performative cooking, panelists Christine Kettaneh, Christine Abi Azar, Siroun Sarian and Chef Hussein Hadid reflected on how matter and meaning intertwine when artists work with food. Their dialogue traced how artists transform food into a language of resistance, healing and collective remembrance, thereby echoing the region’s histories of scarcity, displacement and renewal.