Gestures of Hospitality
Baba Baka (Lora Adzic & Mirjana Savic), Ronen Jafari & Juliette Berkeley, Vivian Qiu, Jenn Tran, Lily Walker
24 Sep–18 Oct 2025
Gestures of Hospitality is an exhibition and series of participatory events by artists whose work explores food as a vessel for culture, care, and connection. Step into the gallery to encounter shared meals as performative offerings, sculptural altars of diasporic memory, intimate dinner scenes rendered in oil paint, and the warming touch of rice-clay in your hands.
EVENTS
Baba Baka: Dobro Došli
(Performance Dinner)
Sun 28 Sept 2025, 6-8pm
Dobro Došli (Welcome) invites audiences into a participatory dinner party held within the gallery. Serving traditional Southern Slavic foods and wearing traditional folk dresses, Baba Baka will welcome you to their table as a reflective activation of cultural identity, community-building, the diasporic experience, and the intersections of public and private spaces.
Vivian Qiu - Build Your Dream Space From Rice
(Workshops)
4 Oct 2025, 3-4.30pm
This workshop invites you to reconnect with your heart and create a miniature dream space where you can empty your mind, daydream, and contemplate. Inspired by the artist's Chinese heritage and the warm comfort food, plain rice congee, you will create a miniature dream space using rice, soil and grass.
Saturday 4th October, 3-4.30pm
Workshop for all audiences
FREE - BOOK HERE.
Ronen Jafari & Juliette Berkeley: Have you heard of Candice?
(Performance Dinner)
Wednesday 1st Oct 2025, 7pm
This is not a dinner party. It’s a trap!
For one night only, Ronen and Jules will turn BLINDSIDE into a working kitchen. They will collectively cook a meal in the middle of the gallery, surrounded by chefs who patiently wait to contribute. The performance is built around a simple rule: anyone who wants to join the conversation must also join the cooking.
EXHIBITIONS
Lily Walker: Tender
Gallery 1
Tender is a painting show, exploring food, intimacy and care through the setting of the shared meal. It positions figurative painting as a means of digesting memories captured through candid photography, and of valuing transitory social moments through the slow and careful process of painting.The paintings portray the intimacy and the strange awkwardness of eating in company. They capture the beauty of produce, the care embodied in preparing food for friends, and the messiness that occurs amid consumption.
Derived from photographs of my family, friends, and domestic environment, the process of painting transforms these fleeting, intimate experiences into lasting works. The paintings depict momentary social occasions, but are created through intense, personal, reflective processes. Returning them to the public realm is an opportunity to reconnect the work to a social setting.
Vivian Qiu: Busy = Dying Heart
Gallery 2
The Chinese word for ‘busy’ (忙 máng) combines two characters: 亡 (meaning ‘to perish’) and 心 (meaning ‘heart’), symbolizing a "dying heart." We are often occupied, flooded with TO-DO lists or the next big goals to chase. But when we are constantly busy, can our bodies slow down, breathe, and truly experience life as it is?
After experiencing constant burnouts and a lingering sense of emptiness, I turned to daily meditation and began doing less — allowing my soul the space to breathe and dream. Inspired by my Chinese heritage and the healing effect of comfort food like plain rice congee, I use rice clay to question the idea of busyness and explore how the slowness and simplicity of life nourish the soul, freeing us from the mental limitations of time.
Time is an illusion—fluid and elastic. We can stretch or shrink it at will. By observing and recreating ancient Chinese clay pots using rice and natural fibres, I reconnect with history and my heritage. This process reminds me how far humanity has come and that it’s okay to slow down and move at my own pace.
While strolling aimlessly in my hometown, I was amazed to discover walls hidden in the lanes, built from low-quality pots and rocks bound by sticky rice mortar. These walls stand through time and wait for us to question the perception of time and seek answers from our ancestors.
Jenn Tran: TV Dinner Altar
Gallery 2
TV Dinner Altar is a multimedia sculptural work that weaves together childhood family dinners and Vietnamese-Australian diasporic experiences. Rooted in personal memory, the work honours cơm gia đình (family dinner) while reimagining the altar as a site of devotion to familial gestures of nourishment, Channel 7 and the quiet weight of routine.
Tran draws from the stylisation of khảm xà cừ altars (Vietnamese pearl inlay) to frame an ode to her cơm gia đình.
The scent of fresh rice, wintermelon shrimp soup and braised catfish, remembering Home and Away, Deal or No Deal, or 7 News playing in the background as we ate. These shows became more than just background noise, they were inadvertent household deities, watching them in ritualistic devotion together. As my parents did not speak English well, the cheap drama of Home and Away and Grant Denyer’s gameshow charisma was compelling and a weird form of connection between us all. We didn’t always speak the same language, but we shared Deal or No Deal and cơm gia đình.
This work stems in a lot of quiet negotiations of identity and of food shared across silences as weekday television held space. Diasporic memory often feels collaged where it is layered with fragments of struggle, survival, daily rituals, and living with the cultural contrast between parents and their children. TV Dinner Altar attempts to hold that fragmentation with tenderness and humour. A necessary softness that holds the heavier things for me.
Exhibition:
Visual works by Jenn Tran, Vivian Qiu and Lily Walker. Visit during gallery hours.
Performance Dinners:
With artist groups: Baba Baka; Ronen Jafari and Juliette Berkley. Bookings essential.
Workshops:
With Vivian Qiu. Bookings essential.
About Blindside's Gallery Activations:
As a counterpoint to our regular exhibition programming, Blindside has introduced Activation Periods in 2025, which allows for projects that are experimental, with varied timelines, a focus on public-programming, and possibilities for collaborative practice and exchange.
Baba Baka (Lora Adzic & Mirjana Savic)
Baba Baka is a collaborative project by artists Mirjana Savić and Lora Adžić. Both hailing from migrant families from former-Yugoslavia, Savić and Adžić come together as Baba Baka to not only explore and celebrate their shared cultural heritage but to also reframe its nuances within a contemporary context. Baba Baka was selected to install a collaborative showcase at the RMIT Graduate Exhibition in 2022. Dobro Došli (Welcome) is the second project for the pair.
Ronen Jafari & Juliette BerkeleyRonen Jafari likes to cook with and for friends.
Juliette Berkeley doesn't really do anything.
Vivian Qiu is an emerging artist whose background in jewellery and fashion informs her innovative approach to wearable art and sculpture. Her practice explores cultural identity, healing and oracle bone script - the most ancient Chinese language used for future prediction. Drawing on her diverse living experiences across different countries, she delves into her roots through unique material research, creating culturally significant pieces from rice, grass, and soil. She uses her creative process to embrace life's challenges and navigate complex emotions. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including in Australia, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
Jenn Tran is a Narrm-based artist and filmmaker working within moving image, animation, and textiles to explore memory, Vietnamese diaspora, and craft. Her work has been shown at ACMI, SEVENTH Gallery, and Sydney Film Festival. In 2023, she received the HRAFF Emerging Fund for her 16mm film ‘How to Build a Forest’, and her sculptural series reimagining Vietnamese pearl inlay was part of an artist residency at Air Huế, Vietnam. Jenn is also a radio presenter on Triple R and a member of Artist Film Workshop.
Lily Walker is a Naarm-based artist who primarily works in oil paint. Her work explores ideas of care, intimacy, and value through the subject matter of the everyday. She is interested in how the strange and the special emerge through the processes of looking, modes of representation and the act of painting, and how our perceptions of everyday and domestic objects and environments can shift when approached from alternative angles - through the practices of care and paying close attention.
Grey Dear is a multidisciplinary artist and discursive practitioner with special interests in collective thinking, ecosomatics and perceptual experience. Coming from a dance background, Grey employs choreographic and embodied approaches across the diverse tendrils of their practice. They create sensorially and intellectually engaging experiences, whether it be an experimental talk, action in a gallery, performance in a theatre or outdoor engagement in a public setting. Grey has been working with Dancehouse to run On The Table - a public program for interdisciplinary exchange and experimentation - for 5 years at Dancehouse with Rebecca Jensen and Ebony Muller. Their work has been hosted by numerous theatres, galleries and festivals across Narrm and Stockholm including Bundoora Homestead, Kings Gallery, c3 and Index Contemporary Art Foundation.