FAENA FESTIVAL
Miami Art Week 2019

THE LAST SUPPER

Faena Festival: The Last Supper explores the connections between food and spirituality—abundance and sacrifice, indulgence and abstinence, archetypal symbolism and contemporary aesthetics, sex and death. It is a platform for the documentation and reinterpretation of myths, rites and ceremonies by artists working across media, as well as for the experience of contemporary rituals, primarily those that elaborate upon or bridge our shared experiences around food and religious practices.

The festival takes the pulpit and the kitchen as joint points of departure, invites us to break bread together and posits the shared meal, prayer, and chant as the crux of social interaction and communal connectivity.

Art and spirituality have been linked for- ever—objects have always been made with intention, imbued with symbolism, and have acquired power and capital from the significance applied to them. Ultimately our rituals and ceremonies are indivisible from contemporary artistic output. These two arenas are often discussed as separate cultural phenomena but the festival makes the case that there may not be a clear line between the two.

The works in The Last Supper are dialectical, simultaneously object-based and immersive, sacred and profane, laden with tradition alongside contemporary expressions of spiritual practices. The festival seeks to establish a multiplicity of viewpoints from divergent spiritual practices and regions of the world, to interpret and redefine our ceremonial rituals and objects, the broader roles they play within our cultural imagining and narratives—and the ways they have permeated and become the organizing principles of our everyday lives. Feasting and fasting—or more precisely, the embodied traditions that we have developed surrounding shared meals or shared spiritual experiences, are often the bedrock and the punctuation of our lives—from the wafer and wine that were the body and the blood, to the ‘bread and circuses’ that marked imperial decadence, to the ritual offerings we leave for our ancestors, and the sanctity of one’s right to a last meal.