Cooking Sunshine Dinner Presentation

ABOUT

Hosted as a dinner presentation on Sunday, 5 May, the artists Lamis Haggag and Mina Nasr share their Lapa residency project, Cooking Sunshine, with culinary pantsula, Mantis Shabane. 

For the Imbibe: Earthen Processes residency, the artists, Lamis Haggag and Mina Nasr, have come together to focus on the effect of the sun on their culture, mythologically & socially to start a conversation about the environmental relevance of solar cooking to our food traditions. For this presentation, they develop cooking practices using the sun, between Northern and Southern Africa into a shared meal. 

Working with culinary pantsula, Mantis Shabane, in an attempt to revive traditional recipes and bring attention to crops and other local foods available in both north and South African countries, as opposed to importing crops throughout the year, they are using local crops and traditional recipes to prepare the food. They will supplement this with some dried crops that they have brought with them from Egypt and Tunisia. 

As a collective working with Daniel Gray, they will build a Solar cooking device as an art installation using materials from the environment around them & documenting their research of the traditional techniques of solar cooking and the South African recipes. 

Join the artists on Sunday, 5 May at 5.30pm for their residency dinner and presentation with culinary pantsula, Mantis Shabane and collaborators. 

Mina Nasr 

Nasr has completed his Bachelor of Applied Arts From Helwan University, Egypt and did his Fulbright research grant in Art and Social Justice at Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, George Washington University, D.C., USA. In previous work, Nasr focused on contemporary issues of climate change caused by building hydropower dams and the effect of man-made obstacles on the environment. He discussed the current African dispute over the Nile among Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia in the form of an art book in Egypt under the title ‘The Book of Gates'.

Lamis Haggag

Haggag has received an MFA from the University of Calgary, Canada and a BFA from Helwan University in Egypt. Since spring 2020, Haggag has been working on different iterations to a story that follows jasmines which travelled with the dead on the sun barge and got lost in the grey Canadian landscape, only to realise that they changed into Monotropa Unifloras: A fragile, translucent, chlorophyll-less, parasitic plant, Native to Ontario, Canada.

Haggag and Nasr’s collective practice spans installation, painting, drawing, interactive installation, social practices, interventions and creative writing. Their project has received support so far from different prestigious institutions including Kamel Lazaar Foundation (KLF), Tunisia; Fulbright Alumni Community Action Grant, USA; Canada Council for the Arts Canada; Roberto Cimetia mobility Fund. In addition to recognition from The Nile Journeys organisation and Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies (BrIAS).

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