Helen Anna Flanagan

In the cult film “La Grande Bouffe” (dir: Marco Ferreri, 1973), a group of bourgeoisie retreats to a luxurious villa with a mission to collectively meet their end through excessive overeating. Adapting Ferreri’s satirical approach to consumerism and decadence to the contemporary context, while relying on his extravagant depictions of abundance, Helen Anna Flanagan will stage a stylized, equally striking (though not morbid!) banquet at the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is “Gestures of Matter” (2020), an absurd film meditation on excessive consumption. However, contrary to Ferreri’s wealthy protagonists, Flanagan’s characters are eccentric melancholics — an overwhelmed waitress, an amateur gastro critic, a poetic gourmet, and an astute fortuneteller — encountered in a dreary fast-food restaurant eating “the blandest, soggiest and most blubbery dishes on the menu.” Expressive shots of their chewing, swallowing, slurping, and sipping are accompanied by audio fragments that highlight the contradictions associated with contemporary food culture. These contradictions range from overeating and extreme diets to the elitist world of fine dining and populist concepts such as “all-you-can-eat,” all the way to the disparity between expected servility and predominantly poor working conditions in the hospitality industry.

The thematic contradictions from the film expand into the gallery space—it’s simultaneously a lavish dining room equipped with a massive edible cake sculpture displayed on an aestheticized replica of Ferreri’s iconic dining table, and a neighborhood kebab joint offering exclusively bright pink kebab sculptures. The kebab serves as an embodiment of the popular phrase “you are what you eat” and a metaphor for accumulation, excess, and unnecessary growth characteristic of capitalism.

Absurd and visceral, Helen Anna Flanagan’s “Feast” urges us to contextualize the individual boundaries of the body and the capacities of pleasure, as well as to contemplate the production and consumption necessary for a dignified life within the limits of sustainability.

Text by Barbara Gregov