Taste of the Sanctioned
- Ministry of Culture in Exile
- School of Arts & Sciences, Weitzman School of Design
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Student Arts Innovation Grant
“The food we plan to prepare is Sholeh Zard, a traditional Persian recipe with rice pudding and saffron. The ingredients needed for this dish will be imported from Iran. Due to US sanctions, among other Iranian products, the ingredients used for this dish face legal constraints through international exchange...On the hardened surface of the dish, we will use laser cut stencils and cinnamon powder to write a list of the Iranian units and entities that have been subjected to the US sanctions according to President Trump’s executive order and official withdrawal from Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action since May 8th, 2018.” - Ministry of Culture in Exile
The Ministry of Culture in Exile is a collective established by Illya Mousavijad and Jenia Ulanova affirming nomadic cross-cultural experience. The Ministry will present an exhibition, ‘Taste of the Sanctioned,’ at a local gallery in Philadelphia, representing the collective’s research on the history of sanctions to generate critical thinking about its common reception as a less violent, more diplomatic alternative to war, and its prohibiting mechanisms of isolation and economical terrorization. Working across media, they plan to provide factual and metaphorical information to represent and reflect on the notion of sanctions as a vehicle of power, a dystopian producer of exile, and its impact on regimes and civilians. The exhibition will feature a cooking session: by providing free food affected by sanctions, they invite their audience to join them in thinking about and questioning current dilemmas that impact production of and access to ingredients, and, indeed, even the taste of food. On the night of the performance, they will host three leading scholars in a panel discussion on the topics of nationalisms, the changing East-West relation, and perceptions and representations of the US, Iran, and Russia.