Food Bigger: Than The Plate

Food Bigger: Than The Plate

Flood: Bigger than the Plate

V&A, 2019

An exhibition about the politics, pleasures, and future of food.

Could we collectively build a food future that is more sustainable, fair and delicious than the one currently on offer? This exhibition brought together projects by over seventy artists and designers who are creatively addressing this question in collaboration with scientists, chefs and local communities. 

Organised in four sections – Composting, Farming, Trading and Eating – it took visitors on a journey through the food cycle, beginning with waste. The show culminated with an eating experience in which visitors could design and taste their own food future. 

Curator: Catherine Flood
Co-curator: May Rosenthal Sloan
Exhibition designer: Juri Nishi, V&A Design Studio
Graphic design: Judith Brugger 
Prop makers: Nick Sellek and Caroline Perry
Senior Exhibition Manager: Olivia Oldroyd

Witty, shocking and charmingly bonkers. When it comes to hard hitting arguments and radical ideas this show will cajole even the most ardent sceptics of environmentalism into engaging with them with an open mind

Alastair Sooke, The Telegraph

Quirky, surprising, beautiful, revolting, tasty, synthetic, thought-provoking, eye-brow raising but never, ever dull.

Mecca Ibrahim, Women in the Food Industry 

FOOD: Bigger than the Plate addresses the issues in a way that is subversive, humorous and wondrous… Its tantalising recipe of science and aesthetics is playfully didactic as it imagines endless possibilities of food futures as well as exploring the age-old relationship between culture and food

Kristina Foster, Culture Whisper

You’ll leave feeling blown away by the possibilities

Harriet Addison, The Times

In each room of Food: Bigger than the Plate we are reminded that food will always be a complex interplay of politics and pleasure. But the final call to arms here – and rightly, in my view – is to pleasure

Bee Wilson, Times Literary Supplement 

This is a show that will stick with you, encouraging you to interrogate why you eat what you do, rather than scarfing it down and getting back to work.

Tabish Khan, The Londonist

FOOD stretched the limits of traditional definitions of food, art, and design, and pushed the spatial boundaries between the kitchen, the laboratory, the dining room, the artist’s studio, and the museum space. 

Laura Eliza Enriquez, The Senses and Society (Routledge)

The viewer was not treated as a passive consumer, but rather hailed as a being who actively and constantly engages with reality via food and taste – in both senses of the term.

Laura Eliza Enriquez, The Senses and Society (Routledge)

Disobedient Objects

Disobedient Objects

Disobedient Objects

V&A, 2014-15

An exhibition about the art and design of grassroots social movements.

Many of the rights and freedoms we enjoy today were won by disobedience. Activist social movements have changed our world from the grassroots up, popularising new ideas and values. The objects made as part of these movements have played a key role in those cultural and political changes, but have mostly been ignored by institutions of art and design. Looking beyond art and design framed by markets, connoisseurs and professionals, Disobedient Objects aimed to address this gap and tell a people’s history of art and design from below. Attracting over 400,000 visitors, it was, at the time, the most visited exhibition at the V&A since 1946. 

Find out more about the thinking behind Disobedient Objects in our introduction to the accompanying book

Co-curator: Catherine Flood
Co-curator: Gavin Grindon
Research Assistant: Steffi Duarte
2D Exhibition Design: Barnbrook Studio
3D Exhibition Design: Line Lund
Exhibition Manager: Sarah Jameson 

One of the most exhilarating and important exhibitions of the year

Zoe Pilger, The Independent

This isn’t protest art, it is protest itself and it’s refreshing to see objects with little financial value but massive potency exhibited a place like the V&A

Alex Dymoke, City A.M

A Welcome institutional shouldering of social responsibility in an irresponsible world

Catharine Rossi, Domus

A challenge has been laid down to us by the curators to see through the appearance of things, and to uncover the much more interesting secret life of grass roots democratic action bubbling just below the surface.

Adam Nathaniel Furman, Disegno

This is a brave and unusual exhibition

Martin Roth, form V&A Director

Disobedient Objects asks us to rethink what counts as both art and as politics…It shows real change can only come when the imagination challenges the institution – and wins.

Dr Anna Feigenbaum, Bournemouth University

This fiery survey of protest objects made by grassroots social movements – staged at the Victoria & Albert Museum, of all places – is a rebel yell from the heart of the establishment.

Skye Sherwin, The Guardian

Disobedient Objects breaks all the rules of a traditional art exhibition. It invites a radical reality into the the museum, giving centre stage to the objects that people use to rebel against the system. Visitors should expect to be shocked and inspired by what they see. 

Vashti Hallissey, PSFK 

Disobedient Objects has to be the most exciting, dynamic and emotive exhibition I’ve seen at the V&A

– Victoria Sadler, Huffington Post

Lost Treasures of Revolution: The Graphics of Solidarity 1980-89

Lost Treasures of Revolution: The Graphics of Solidarity 1980-89

Lost Treasures of Revolution: The Graphics of Solidarity 1980-89

Touring Exhibition, 2021-22

An exhibition about the graphics that helped to build and sustain one of the biggest social movements of the 20th century.

As the leading political force opposing communism in Poland during the 1980s, Solidarity paved the way for a peaceful transition to democracy in 1989. From its iconic logo to spontaneous poster designs and underground ephemera, this exhibition showed how the movement’s graphics created a rich visual culture of resistance that spoke to people from all walks of society.

It included 25 Solidarity poster designs, shown alongside a selection of badges and rarely seen underground stamps bearing witness to the grassroots creative spirit of the movement in the 1980s.

Curator: Catherine Flood
Designer: Vipul Sangoi, Raindesign
Organiser: The Polish Cultural Institute, London

Photogrtaphy Vipul Sangoi

A World to Win: Posters of Protest and Revolution

A World to Win: Posters of Protest and Revolution

A World to Win: Posters of Protest and Revolution

V&A Touring Exhibition, 2014-16

An exhibition of posters agitating for political change, from women’s campaign for the vote to present day struggles for social justice.

A World to Win featured posters by radical print collectives, anonymous artists and celebrated designers working under many different conditions for many different causes. Together, they demonstrated how people have used the poster over the past hundred years as a powerful means to agitate, educate and organise. 

Curator: Catherine Flood
Assistant Curator: Rowan Bain
Exhibition Manager: Vanessa North

Gallery images by John Hartley of the exhibition at Nottingham Castle, 2016.
Object images from the V&A collection. 

This film was produced by The Irish Times while the exhibition was on show at the National Print Museum in Dublin, 2015

A New National Dish: UAE

A New National Dish: UAE

A New National Dish: UAE

AlSerkal Avenue, Dubai, 2020

An exhibition and eating experience by the Center for Genomic Gastronomy that imagined how climate change will alter what people eat in the UAE ten years from now. 

It is the year 2030, and the national dish of the UAE is…?

New National Dish: UAE laid out four possible directions that the national cuisine – and by extension the UAE itself – may take in response to the environmental, economic and social impacts of climate change. Using stories, recipes, tasters and re-designed national flags, it presented speculative fictions for visitors to taste and debate, imagine with, or push back against. 

Supported by the British Council, this project was an extension of the V&A exhibition, Food: Bigger than the Plate. 

Curator: Catherine Flood
Artists: The Centre for Genomic Gastronomy

Images copyright Alserkal Avenue