Workshop

CAG and The Jewish Museum and Archives of BC are pleased to present The Chosen Food: Shabbat Dinner & Fresh Challah. This is the second event in the series Mantι, Börek, Baklava by Vancouver-based artist Derya Akay, the current Burrard Marina Field House resident this spring. Akay will prepare a dinner informed by the family recipes of Jewish community members Sara Ciacci, Leonor Etkin, Claire Hammer, and Debbie Kafka. Several of these women will be present to share the history, memory and symbolism associated with the dishes served.

Expanding on recent projects, Akay is collaborating with women elders from a range of cultural backgrounds to explore and share local and diasporic culinary traditions through a series of workshops and meals. This convivial partaking of food is a gateway to oral history, which Akay understands as both storytelling and the sensations and memories summoned through communal eating.

This event is also the first evening in The Jewish Museum and Archives of BC supper club series, The Chosen Food. Each event in this series will showcase a regional style of Jewish cuisine.

Biography

Derya Akay (b, 1988, Istanbul, Turkey) is an artist living in Vancouver. Recent solo exhibitions include Campbell River Art Gallery (2017); Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles (2017); Kunstverein Toronto (2015); and Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner & Supper, Centre A, Vancouver (2014). He received the 2016 Portfolio Prize Emerging Artist Award, Vancouver, and was shortlisted for the 2015 RBC Emerging Artists People’s Choice Award at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. Recent and upcoming group exhibitions include Ambivalent Pleasures, Vancouver Art Gallery (2016); Geometry of Knowing Part I, SFU Galleries, Vancouver, (2015).