Probiotics of the Kitchen
(2015)

With their video, the artist duo Leila Nadir and Cary Adams (he recently changed his name from Cary Peppermint to Cary Adams) quote an icon of American video history in the title and rework it in the handwritten design of the introduction: “Semiotics of the Kitchen” by Martha Rosler from 1975, formulated a feminist critique of the traditional housewife’s role. Martha Rosler can be seen handling kitchen appliances and spelling the alphabet with them. With Nadir and Adams’s change of word in the title, a semiotic, i.e. linguistic sign system is transformed into a probiotic bacterial process and thus shifted back towards cooking.

Leila Nadir and Cary Adams take up the same setting in their video forty years later. Here, too, the artist is standing behind a table in her kitchen, facing the viewer directly, just as in cooking shows, which Martha Rosler quoted with her own static film excerpt before. The arrangement of furniture and objects is similar: on the right of the picture there is a large refrigerator, behind the cook there is a shelf and the stove, and on the left there is a teapot and a radio. The big difference is that Leila Nadir prepares food and Martha Rosler uses the kitchen utensils to achieve an abstract goal: she intends to use them to demonstrate the letters from A to Z as a female protest attitude in the air. In the feminist’s kitchen, no meal is prepared; nor is there any food.

Quite different in the video “Probiotics of the Kitchen”. Leila Nadir demonstrates an old, nowadays less used canning technique, the fermentation of white cabbage. Grating the cabbage proves to be a tiresome task. Like Martha Rosler, she wears an old-fashioned kitchen dress, but it has a function here. The artist duo has quoted the older video model in detail. Their film is also in black and white. In doing so, they refer back to an old-fashioned film aesthetic. This stands out starkly from cooking shows with chic cuisine, the latest cooking appliances and cheerfully cooking people. The message of the artist duo is in 2017: Back to the simple. At a time when fast food and industrial production of food are widespread in America, the artists propagate a healthy lifestyle, which also includes ecological awareness. In doing so, they are reflecting on the knowledge of Nadir’s American-Afghan ancestors.

It is interesting to compare the end of the two films: The young Martha Rosler energetically draws a ‘Z’ in the air with the big kitchen knife like Zorro with the whip. The appropriation of the key gesture of the famous American novel and film character, also called “Avenger of the Poor”, is done with self-irony. At the end of her film, the kitchen rebel from 1975 also makes a little fun of her own appearance with a heavenward glance. No kitchen rebellion happens in 2017. Leila Nadir, visibly tired after her work, takes a sip of water. Utopias of a healthy diet in today’s world start in her own everyday practice.

Andrea Domesle, translated by Christopher Haley Simpson