FAENA FESTIVAL MIAMI: THE LAST SUPPER

With the usual multi-disciplinary approach, the second edition of Faena Festival: The Last Supper will happen at the Faena District in Miami Beach. With works by numerous artists, both consecrated and emerging, video installations and an all-encompassing culinary activation, the experience seeks an exploration of spirituality and food, abundance and sacrifice, indulgence and abstinence.

Alan Faena, Argentinean businessman and philanthropist, said: “I created the Festival to be an incubator for new talents and ideas that inspire me, a space for connectivity, and to support artists to realize their dream projects, push limits and blur boundaries across artistic disciplines, and ultimately to generate new dialogues, narratives and experiences.”

The event takes the pulpit and the kitchen as its point of departure and posits the shared meal (or prayer) as the crux of social interaction and communal connectivity. The works in the Festival are dialectical: simultaneously sacred and profane, object-based and immersive, imbued with tradition and contemporary expressions of spiritual practices. A constant intertwining of past and present, practicality and thought. They establish a multiplicity of viewpoints surrounding ceremonial rituals and objects, and their broader roles within cultural imaginings and narratives from around the world. The experiential presentation and curatorial format will occupy and engage with the entire site.

The curator, Zoe Lukov, shared her thoughts: “Art and spirituality have been linked forever-objects have always been made with intention, imbued with symbolism, and have acquired power and capital from the significance applied to them. Feasting and fasting, traditions that we have developed around shared meals and shared spiritual experiences, are often the bedrock of our lives, from the wafer and wine that were the body and the blood, to the ‘bread and circuses’ that marked imperial decadence, to the sanctity of one’s right to a last meal, or the offerings we leave our ancestors. We have often turned to spirituality or food for solace and healing, and this festival wants us to catch the spirit.”

The Last Supper will include new commissions by Sophia Al-Maria, Gabriel Chaile, Myrlande Constant, Emeka Ogboh, Osías Yanov with Lulo Demarco and Jamilah Sabur; installations by Camille Henrot, Zhang Huan, and the Propeller Group; an LED billboard boat on the waterways of Miami, which will serve as a platform for mobile video installations by Janine Antoni, Jillian Mayer and Ana Mendieta; a cinema series with nightly screenings by Yael Bartana, Andrea Buttner, Christian Jankowski, Jumana Manna, Pedro Neves Marques, Grethell Rasúa, Faith Ringgold, Martha Rosler and Antonia Wright; and a Supper Series, featuring culinary activations and shared meals by Jim Denevan, Lunafridge, Francis Mallmann and Paul Qui, among others.