Emotional Eating | Group Exhibition | Indie Gallery

Some exhibitions leave an impression. This one leaves an aftertaste — of salty fish in your mouth: sharp, persistent, lingering long after borders have been crossed and years have passed.
“Emotional Eating” transforms the kitchen into both a physical and symbolic space where an ongoing negotiation unfolds between identity, memory, and migration.
Three artists — Dena (Vardena) Simonyan, Nastya Faybish, and Michelle Boginski — explore food as a space of survival, connection, and healing.

The link between food and mental health is present here not just as a topic, but as a lived experience. In extreme circumstances — such as the recent war — when systems collapse, the act of eating becomes an accessible, comforting, and intimate tool. In the words of Paul Gilroy, these are everyday practices through which migrants construct “routes of survival” — emotional bridges to a complex and unstable sense of self.

Fish-based dishes — salted fish, non-kosher seafood, the familiar taste of herring — appear in the artists’ works as flavors tied to crises and celebrations, to loss and joy. It’s the taste of a home that no longer exists — or one that is only now being formed.

Nastya Faybish acts as a visual anthropologist of material memory — visiting migrants’ homes, documenting recipes, utensils, objects, and stories. Her works turn the kitchen into a living archive where family narratives intertwine with academic perspective. The viewer is invited to look “from above” — both literally and conceptually — at a space of identity built from humble and emotional objects.

Michelle Boginski creates a sharp, vibrant, and precise visual language, deconstructing symbols of post-Soviet food culture — refrigerators, plates, dishes — and reassembling them as expressive, ironic, and tender critiques. In her work, food is both a beloved object and a site of conflict: between childhood and image, between tradition and ideology.

Dena (Vardena) Simonyan works slowly and attentively with analog photography. For her, photography is an act of healing — not a freezing of nostalgia, but a practice of presence and listening. In images taken in her grandparents’ home in Ashdod, everyday moments are imbued with delicate memories that yearn to stay alive. Through the lens, she builds relationships: between past and present, inner and outer, figure and frame.