Omar Castañeda has worked with food since he was a Fine Arts student at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, and he has continued this focus throughout his practice in London, the city where he now resides. He has a genuine love of cooking – in fact, he even considered becoming a chef – but he also sees the enormous aesthetic and conceptual potential of food as a metaphor for life, the economy, society, and cultural thought. In a sense, this exhibition, “Panela: The New Gold of Colombia,” offers us a global view of this paradigm.
Omar Castañeda has worked with food since he was a Fine Arts student at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, and he has continued this focus throughout his practice in London, the city where he now resides. He has a genuine love of cooking – in fact, he even considered becoming a chef – but he also sees the enormous aesthetic and conceptual potential of food as a metaphor for life, the economy, society, and cultural thought. In a sense, this exhibition, “Panela: The New Gold of Colombia,” offers us a global view of this paradigm.
The main type of food Omar uses in his work is raw sugar cane. It is the primary extract of the cane used in Colombia to sweeten beverages, and it has always been linked to power in Latin America. From the colonial era to the present day, there has been an ongoing dispute over the use of sugar cane, whether as food or as biofuel. Castañeda addresses these issues in his work and states that “it's something basic, a pillar, a kind of multi-use product that comes in many forms, and that makes it a lot of fun aesthetically, but politically very rich.” For him, it is a basic concept that permeates almost all of his creative output.
In particular, this exhibition is a collection of visual explorations of the parallels between Gold and Sugar Cane, as both present this dual functionality as a source of food and energy and as a source of power and wealth.
Through a combination of installations, objects, paintings, screen prints, videos, and audience participation with edible artworks, Omar is able to create an experience that illustrates the importance of panela in the life and heritage of Colombians – one might even say it is a metaphor for Colombian identity.
This is, in fact, how Omar sees it, and so it is only fitting that he is able to bring us the fruit of his years of observation and experience in both countries, incorporating them into the creation of this exhibition back where his mission began – at home, in Bogotá.
The exhibition opens on March 9 and will be open to the public until April 16, 2016.
Sandra Higgins
Co-curator