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It’s Thursday, the opening day of the India Art Fair in Delhi, blisteringly hot in the afternoon, and I’m watching a woman attack a fridge with the dedication of someone who just found out it ate her leftovers. Except the Japanese performer, Yuko Kaseki, isn’t in a revenge movie. She’s serving what the description for this performance series calls ‘conceptual cooking’.
With an open-air kitchen made by an actual Indian architect that had rather reminded me of a canteen, I’m not sure what to make of what I’m seeing yet – just agog.
This is Breakfast in a Blizzard by HH Art Spaces. But don’t take that literally. Breakfast is the last thing on my mind. Kaseki – yellow-haired, face caked up in white, in a metallic dress and heels – bangs a pot. Hard. Against everything. Someone in the crowd shouts 'ME!', garnering a few chuckles. She assaults the tap, flips the dustbin lid, climbs into the oven, her heels up in the air. Somehow, this doesn’t feel like the chaos of being stuck in a calamity either. It’s all with a blank expression.
Here’s the thing: this is, of course, made for your watching, but I can’t help asking myself if I’m a spectator or voyeur. The performer even responds to birdsong in the air and escapes the kitchen, trying to grab nothing. Beside the intent viewers, other fairgoers are eating lunch, scrolling their phones, living their best lives. 'ZOMBIE MOVIEEE!' one exclaims. Reactions range as far from nervous laughter to complete ignoring. It feels even worse, yet wondrous, to ignore something as primal as this.
HH Art Spaces has been doing this kind of thing since 2013 in Goa – gathering artists and generally insisting that performance art deserves a seat at the table (or in this case, a kitchen to destroy). And Studio Rawfine deserves praise for creating what is essentially a kitchen-shaped void. It's the perfect playground for Kaseki's Butoh-influenced chaos and sets the stage for fellow performers Uriel Barthélémi and Suman Sridhar (aka Black Mamba), whose practices apparently involve improvisation and jazz-opera-spoken-word fusion that I'm curious and terrified to experience on the later days.
When I first heard of this from the artist statement, like I said earlier, I was expecting something about cooking lovingly for your family. Honestly, I was even reminded of how at every house party, the most intense conversations have happened in the kitchen – a site where the host has to return, but it’s not so private that the others accuse you of being missing. It could still be at least in part about that.
But it seems like it’s also about the absurdity of being alone, while still bound by the fact that you experience the gaze of a society within itself, and will return to it. You know those weird relationships you built with your toys as a kid? Or the way you might talk to your kettle, aggressively reorganise your cutlery at 2 in the morning, and then come to work the next day? Something resonates from there. In an unbearably moving, public, bonkers way.
I step away to see other parts of the fair – paintings that politely stay on their walls, sculptures that don't open their eyes at you – but I come back. Of course I come back. By now, Kaseki has started making faces, before she retreats back to her oven. When she emerges again, I ask myself: was she free or trapped? I still don't know. Maybe you will, when you see what happens next. But I do know I'll think about this every time I get time alone in the kitchen, which is both a gift and curse.
When you can catch it
The next performances begin on February 6 at 6pm, and February 7 at 12:45 pm. Bring sunscreen on the 7th.