Taus Makhacheva
During a residency at London’s Delfina Foundation, Makhacheva staged a special dinner event under the title ‘Gazing At The Highlanders, Gazing From The Highlands’ (2015), exploring questions of memory, history, and geopolitics. The dishes spanned from the time of the Caucasian War (1817-1864) till the present. The food was accompanied by ‘moustache spoons’ (designed to protect facial hair from food spillage)— custom-made replicas of the original early 20th-century Dagestani cutlery from the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts. Similar to her ‘Caspian Sea’ (2014) performance, the event explored food as a metaphor articulating complex geopolitical histories.