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"The Neighbour's Plate" - Derya Akay, Amna Elnour, Dana Qaddah Unit 17, Vancouver, 28 November 2020 to 17 January 2021 by April Thompson
Stepping into the exhibition "The Neighbour's Plate" feels like stepping into a sensory still-life painting of 2020. Masked and sanitized on entry, you are greeted by the scent of cured meat: cloves, allspice, black pepper, and paprika on duck. Alone in the space, you feel the presence of others in the central display-a low circular wooden table dressed with food, mementos, and the vessels of consumer packaging. Derya Akay, Amna Elnour, and Dana Qaddah have set their table with traces that are both personal and mass-produced- Akay's hand-painted silk pillow and Qaddah's wooden inlay box, with contents shut out of view, are accompanied by impersonal items like a yoga block and an industrial meat slicer. Even reading these objects can be misleading. The meat slicer and takeaway containers are not newly store-bought but come from a local restaurant owned by Qaddah's cousin. In these ways, the table is richly layered with the artists' roots and lived experience, indexing Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Sudan, and North America.
Circling the table, you take in the scent of the meat that hangs above in suspended brown twine. Elnour has encrusted two cuts of duck with hickory, rose petal, and smoked salt, spicing it to make a variation on basturma, before airing it in the gallery. When you observe the spread on the table, it is tempting to make sense of it by reaching for allegorical readings. A photograph of a slaughtered lamb. A copy of the Quran. These are placed alongside a...