2020

When Rembrandt Shops at TOKO

Photography

What if Rembrandt lives in our time and buys his food at the supermarket?

He would find food from all places in the world, Costa Rica, South Africa, Indonesia, China, Egypt, and Peru. How is it possible to gather all these nationalities on one table? Would he find people from all cultures on the table as well? Under which circumstances they have migrated here?

These questions serve as the point of departure for the photo series When Rembrandt Shops at Toko. It is an imitation to the still life painting with contemporary context. The common items one can find in grocery stores are being carefully placed in silverware on velvet fabrics, though many are sill wrapped in plastics.

By connecting the colonial past to the ‘globalized’ present, this work investigates on the politics of food to reflect on our role as individual consumers, starting from our dinner table, to the production chain and to the land. By highlighting the cosmopolitan food culture in the Golden Age style, it questions the notion of cultural diversity with a critical look on the movement of food as a process of migration.