As part of the social convenings for the Around the Table exhibition, social practice artist Philippa Pham Hughes has organized three intimate and invitation-only conversations around meals, centered on featured artworks by Jennifer Wen Ma, Jo Smail, and Helen Zughaib. While Ma’s site-specific installation, BElonging engages the theme of belonging and empathy, Smail’s Collaged Constructions and Zughaib’s Eat the News confront us with the continuous social and racial inequalities, and the ongoing war conflicts resulting in vast displacements of civilians and devastating humanitarian crises.
At the conclusion of each evening’s discussion, Hughes’ collaborator, poet-artist Thu Anh Nguyen, writes a poem that embodies the conversation by turning the words of the participants into lyrical verse. In the spirit of the exhibition—to spark earnest discussions and collective engagement—the poems can be viewed by QR code in the gallery or here.
