Rewilding the Kitchen
Talking Peers | Reading Salon
Developed in Dialogue with Image Journal
May 28, 2026
Inspired by Rewilding the Kitchen, an interview with New York Times bestselling author Rachel Yoder published in Image Journal’s The Kitchen Issue, the inaugural Talking Peers: A Reading Salon convened artists, writers, curators, and thinkers on the rooftop of a historic church in Chinatown.
Curated by Leeza Ahmady in collaboration with Amie Hollmann and developed in dialogue with Image Journal, the evening featured contributions by Emilio Rojas, Dara Hartley, Roya Ghiasy, and Jed Kiang, and approached the kitchen as both a physical and imaginative space where memory, hunger, care, intimacy, creativity, and survival converged. Through performance, sound, conversation, and shared culinary offerings, participants explored how acts of nourishment shape personal and collective histories, revealing food, the body, and the table as sites of cultural transmission, belonging, and transformation.
Together, these contributions expanded the notion of the kitchen beyond its walls. Across the evening, it emerged as a site of knowledge and cultural memory—present in the mother’s body, the ritualized gesture, the speculative imagination, and acts of hospitality. Through these varied practices, nourishment emerged as a living force that shapes identity, preserves history, and creates connection across generations and geographies.
Merging the peer-to-peer ethos of Asia Contemporary Art Forum’s Talking Peers program with the reflective spirit of Image Journal’s Reading Groups, Talking Peers: A Reading Salon is conceived as an ongoing space for listening, conversation, and performative exchange. Through encounters with texts, artistic practices, and shared experiences, the salon invites artists, writers, curators, and thinkers into dialogue around questions of mystery, imagination, spirituality, care, and lived experience.
See the full curatorial statement in PDF format HERE.
Image Journal fosters contemporary art and writing that explore religious faith, spiritual questions, and the mystery of being human through its journal, programs, and creative community. Asia Contemporary Art Forum (ACAF) cultivates connectivity, collaboration, and exchange among Asia-based and Asian diaspora artistic communities through curatorial and educational initiatives.
A minute-long compilation of the Rewilding the Kitchen salon performances & culinary offerings.
Emilio Rojas (New York)
Ahuacatl (2026), 2-hour performance
Emilio Rojas presented Ahaucatl, a performance that used the avocado as both material and metaphor. Drawing from the Nahuatl origins of the word ahuacatl—meaning “testicle”—the work traced the fruit’s journey from Indigenous Mexican cultivation to its contemporary status as a globally commodified agricultural product. Through a durational action in which avocado was applied to the artist’s body and gradually oxidized, darkening the skin over time, Rojas engaged the intertwined histories of colonialism, racialization, desire, and self-identification. Drawing upon his own mestizo heritage and experiences navigating inherited standards of whiteness, the performance transformed a familiar food into a vehicle for confronting the enduring legacies of colonial caste systems and reclaiming Indigenous ancestry through embodied gesture and ritual.
Dara Hartley (New York)
The Global Griot (2026), Speculative zine
Dara Hartley presented excerpts from The Global Griot, a speculative Afrofuturist food and travel zine set in an alternate contemporary world where a prolonged Black Plague led to the collapse of Europe and the flourishing of interconnected African, Indigenous, Islamic, and Asian civilizations. Combining storytelling, illustration, editorial design, AI-generated imagery, and worldbuilding, the project imagined a richly developed culinary culture shaped by different centers of global exchange. Through live readings and a hand-stitched publication featuring travel writing, recipes, and cultural artifacts, Hartley used food as a lens through which to reimagine history, hospitality, identity, and alternative futures.
Roya Ghiasy (Delft & New York)
Lullllaby (2026), Sound Sculpture, 4 min sound recording.
Roya Ghiasy contributed Lullllaby, a sound work composed from recordings of breastmilk pumping. Emerging from reflections on motherhood, caregiving, and artistic practice, the piece considered the mother’s body as a primary site of nourishment—the first kitchen. By transforming the intimate rhythms of pumping milk into a hidden studio soundtrack, the work blurred distinctions between labor and artmaking, care and creation, drawing attention to the often-unseen forms of work that sustain both life and creativity.
Jed Kiang (Taipei & New York)
Chinaki: Broth for the Road (2026), Liquid and Metal
Jed Kiang shared Broth for the Road, a culinary offering inspired by the overlapping land and maritime Silk Roads that have shaped centuries of cultural exchange across Asia and beyond. Combining elements of the Afghan dish Chainaki and the Taiwanese dish Yunba Teng, the slow-simmered lamb broth served as a sensory bridge between distinct culinary traditions. Shared among participants, the offering functioned as a living archive of interconnected histories, revealing food as both nourishment and a vessel of cultural memory.
