Michael Rakowitz's Enemy Kitchen Dinner Lecture
Sunday, December 16th 6-10pm
Location: Satellite loft space located on 18th and Mission









“In producing Enemy Kitchen, I imagined the effectiveness of a platform where people of various backgrounds and different political opinions could participate in a project that would serve as a cultural puncture, thereby enabling the current conflict to create a situation where information and customs flow in two directions, affecting people on both sides. The invisibility in this country of Iraqi culture, beyond the daily news, is alarming. In Paris, it is hard to walk too far before finding a North African restaurant or market, an appropriate apparition to guard against an amnesia concerning the destructive colonial occupation by France in places like Algeria. Until recently, there were no Iraqi restaurants in New York City (I have heard one just opened in March). The possibility of cultural visibility to produce an alternative discourse is, in my view, formidable. And what better vehicle than the consumption of food and the space of conversation that a meal can create?"

—Michael Rakowitz


Enemy Kitchen is an ongoing project begun by Michael Rakowitz in 2004. Collaborating with his Iraqi-Jewish mother, he compiles Baghdadi recipes and teaches them to different public audiences.

For the first incarnation of the project, organized by More Art, Rakowitz cooked with a group of middle school and high school students who live in Chelsea and participate in after-school and summer programs at the Hudson Guild Community Center. Some had relatives in the US Army stationed in Iraq. In preparing and then consuming the food, it opened up another topic through which the word 'Iraq’ could be discussed—in this case, attached to food, as a representative of culture and not as a stream of green-tinted images shown on CNN of a war-torn place. The project functioned as a social sculpture: while cooking and eating, the students engaged each other on the topic of the war and drew parallels with their own lives, at times making comparisons with bullies in relation to how they perceive the conflict.