Ways Of Eating at Apotheke 2-4 April

Ways of Eating: A performance; an installation; a consumption.

Ways of Eating takes the form of a dinner party carried out as a durational and disintegrating installation over five hours on three consecutive nights.

The performance is a theoretical and literal consumption of John Berger's seminal text, , Ways of Seeing, exploring how and why we consume art and images and what factors dictate and manipulate the form of that consumption.

Each evening eight new performers are invited to eat at the gallery where, transformed into the exhibit, their own roles, rituals and assumptions are scrutinized by the transient audience passing by.

Each of the six courses served is a physical essay on one or more aspects of the Berger text, examining how the meaning of art and images in general is manipulated through the context in which we encounter them, the male and female gaze as played out in the form of the traditional nude and how advertising, art (and perhaps pornography) address the viewer.

Expanding from the text the form and presentation of the performance aspires to draw from and dissect Performance Theory (Peggy Phelan), Scopophilia & feminist criticism (Laura Mulvey, Grizelda Pollock, Tessa de Lauretis etc), Fluxus and Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud).

Charlotte Jarvis has exhibited at Madder139 and The Atlantis Gallery in London, The Big Shed in Suffolk and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and as part of the Edinburgh International Festival. Charlotte is part of the ShowFlat collective and is now studying an MA at the Royal College of Art. She will be exhibiting and performing at The Barbican, The BAC, Bristol Old Vic, Edinburgh Forest Fringe and for the 5 x 15 lecture series across London this year.

James Read is a journalist, photographer and visual technician with a fierce sense of gluttony and a desire to provoke overconsumption in others.

Charlotte and James met after a casual sexual encounter and have since been collaborating through the medium of their ArtForEating projects (www.artforeating.com).

Ways Of Eating is co-commissioned by APOTHEKE and Penelope  Sacorafos.

To have a sneaky peak at the trailor for 'Ways of Eating' directed by James Read click here.