Soffreh

Soffreh is a digestible food installation drawn from the private memories of Iranian artist Gita Meh. Soffreh meaning tablecloth is a traditional Muslim religious offering made by women for women that has been kept alive for fourteen hundred years. It is the process of preparing food for a party of fifty women or more each time one desires something from Allah. The women cook and prepare colorful dishes for two days. Then the ceremony starts by constant praying, moaning, crying and singing. Then consumption of delicious and decorated foods begin. Tasting, and dancing they practice a kind of independence or liberation from the public or patriarchal power. Through this offering they both perform their religious duties and at the same time transcend it. In this installation a 30 feet long tablecloth is poured out of 300 pounds of sugar on the ground in a rectangular shape. And specific foods are made for this offering and are decoratively placed on the sugared tablecloth. Fifty prayer rugs in various colors carpet the tablecloth all around. On each prayer rug a folded black veil is placed as the audience experiences wearing a chadoor while trying to serve food, eat and communicate. Meh explains, “Soffreh is an interactive piece, which needs and depends on the audiences collaboration and participation in order for the installation to have functionality, in other words the audience becomes the effectiveness of the artwork itself. Soffreh is the art of interaction where the audience will be able to examine the process of human-to-human, culture-to-culture communication. The audience sits around the Soffreh (Tablecloth) forming new meaning, visualizing new possibilities for cultural understanding to reach broader form of integration. Where the white tablecloth becomes the canvas as audience can draw onto sugar using their finger as an art tool.” For Meh, “Soffreh is the experience of exchanges between diverse individual human landscapes reflecting o