Power Food: Antoni Miralda, at ARTIUM (Basque Country)

Antoni Miralda. Energy Punch, 2004. Mixed media. © MIRALDA

June 4 - November 2, 2008
ARTIUM, Basque Centre-Museum of Contemporary Art, presents the exhibition “Power Food. Antony Miralda” from June 4 to November 2, a singular poetic look at the connections between food, energy and power, and a reflection on the links between nutrition, politics, medicine, science fiction and popular culture. Miralda deals with the multiple derivations from the world of food, from the issue of drugs and doping, to its economic, social, scientific and creative implications. To accompany the exhibition, a catalogue will be published describing how the exhibition was assembled and including a number of different texts relating to the issues tackled by this project, as well as a program of activities that includes films, talks and gastronomy. “Power Food” is a production by ARTIUM (Vitoria-Gasteiz) and Es Baluard of Palma de Mallorca, based on an idea of Miralda-FoodCulturaMuseum (Barcelona).

In this exhibition, Antoni Miralda has brought together videos, images and countless products and objects collected throughout the world in order to demonstrate that food has powers that transcend its purely nutritive function. In this sense, the exhibition proposes, for example, an intercultural journey that highlights the relationships that have always existed between money and food everywhere, and which are economically very powerful. Advertising, images of food and its containers, as well as the ways used to present it (to which Miralda pays a great amount of attention), are a reflection of that economic power and also the power of images of food. The design and graphical presentation of a food product have an influence both on its potential consumers and on its taste and texture. “Power Food” points out how advertising has developed a great deal since its beginnings, and an exhibition of posters, wrappings, advertising and objects evokes the past like distant flavors.

Miralda also highlights the intense relationship between politics, the control this implies, and food. This is the case with drugs and their subjection to legal controls, in spite of the fact that the boundary between drugs and foodstuffs is on occasion, not so clear. This is the case with ephedrine, guarana and caffeine; or the issue of doping, which is the sacred food for some sports persons and which is strictly persecuted.

This Catalonian artist does not avoid current issues like obesity, another consequence of the power of food and potential client of advertising and, once more, of politics. Obesity has had and continues to have different historical, social and medical interpretations, in accordance with each culture. The relationship is drawn between being overweight and aesthetics, one’s image, with the reflection of that image in the cinema and magazines. And at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are the diseases that accentuate social concerns about alimentation, anorexia and bulimia.

And Antoni Miralda also draws our attention to the world of cuisine and popular medicine. Cooking is alchemy and the simple act of cooking a product involves bringing about changes in its matter. The artist recalls that fire was the first scientific application to food, and thanks to this, the art of cooking has reached its current level of innovation. Science and research are closely linked to food and proof of this is, for example, the major development and dissemination of transgenic products.

For its part, popular medicine and, especially, Chinese medicine, are thousand-year-old sciences capable of extracting miraculous, esoteric and magical components from food, which, in this way, is given almost supernatural curative powers. As the exhibition shows, the age-old wisdom of witches, quacks, magicians and sorcerers was applied to plants and herbs. With the aid of their modern and industrial counterparts, people take elixirs and potions, follow organic diets, food supplements for vitamins, and super minerals, contemporary, energy or biological drinks, miraculous pills, after-party products, aphrodisiac or sacred foods, ointments and magical potions. All these come together in “Power Food.”

For further info, please visit, www.artium.org