Sour Things, an exhibition by Jerusalem-born artist Mirna Bamieh, is the inaugural season of ICA’s new artistic research program Lightless Fires (2024–26), seeking fermentation as a figure and technique of collective memory, autonomous archiving, and writing history. Bamieh reflects on the process of fermentation through a body of work entitled Sour Things, which incorporates text, ceramics, drawings, sound, and video into site-specific installations. Thus far taking shape as a market, kitchen, and pantry, Sour Things comprises models of domesticity made in response to the specific socio-political conditions in Palestine that have displaced Bamieh. She asks if and how can one practice preservation while residing in liminality, while being in-between? To practice fermentation, one needs to inhabit a place, but perhaps preservation can be practiced anywhere?
In Shanghai, through moving images and a diffusion of sound, scent, and light, as well as pieces of in/organic matter scattered about, Sour Things: The Kitchen (2023/24) unfolds as an uncontained psychogeographical space that maps the functions and mechanics of the artist’s “body”—both as an individual and as part of a community—onto the structure and contents of a kitchen. Lemons in various states of transformation rest within glass jars and ceramic bowls; ceramic bodies and body parts, made in collaboration with artisans in China, lie amongst layers of salt. Bamieh expands her body to include the body of the jar, and the body of the jar to include the world. Like the liminal space of the jar expanded into the artist's body and home, perpetually displaced and awaiting, Sour Things: The Kitchen is an eerie, uncanny scene for perpetual becoming, populated by things in between preservation and decay, between movements, between expansion and contraction, between various hues of sour.
Sour Things emerged from a period of introspection, while the artist was “fermenting in quarantine” and was “filling [her] pantry with jars as measures against an uncertain future” when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. While confined to her home and making countless jars of ferments, Bamieh reflected on fermentation as a metaphor, but also as a material process. She began writing a series of texts, combining poetic observations and personal histories with adjacent recipes for fermented vegetables, fruits, beverages, yogurt, and bread. These texts and recipes are presented for reading and sharing on a communal table, which is also the site of fermentation workshops led by local creative practitioners drawing upon related questions of collective care and preservation.
Descending into the basement below The Kitchen, a cellar-like space emerges for storage and retrieval; a space for collecting and recollecting memories and materials. Another haunting soundscape confronts the listener, in which a deep, incessant hunger accompanies Bamieh's negotiation of repetitive quotidian occurrences alongside her sense of a world continually on the verge of collapse. More jars are depicted in drawings and a film, reflecting on rituals of self-protection, preservation, social transformation, regeneration, and what we can learn from bacterial cultures to create communities in times of uncertainty and crisis.
Through Sour Things, fermentation becomes a philosophical analogy for the nature of memory, history, change, time, and co-existence, without losing a sensorial attunement to the very corporeal phenomenon of fermentation itself. Fermentation allows us to preserve things, while it also changes the thing it preserves.
Sour Things is accompanied by related events, including:
OPENING RECEPTION
- Thursday, 19 September, 16–19:00
To celebrate the opening of Sour Things, the ICA collaborates with local restaurateur Wael Accad and third generation pickle master JIN Ruijun to present a tasting menu of Lebanese cuisine and fermented vegetables made in the tradition of nearby Sanlin community. The reception is held in the spirit of the artist’s live art project Palestine Hosting Society, through which Bamieh stages dinner performances that revitalize disappearing food cultures and intergenerational legacies.
WORKSHOP
Maolago White Sour
- Saturday, 19 October, 14–16:00
Guizhou-born designer and co-owner of the experimental Guizhou-inspired restaurant Maolago, DIAO Wei facilitates a workshop on crafting traditional fermented sour soup of the Miao ethnic group in southwest China. The workshop explores how these practices preserve cultural identity and connect the community through food, offering participants hands-on experience in fermentation techniques and insights into the significance of “sourness” in Guizhou culinary culture.
WORKSHOP
Secret Society of Kombucha
- Friday, 1 November, 19–20:30
- Friday, 6 December, 19–20:30
Facilitated by architect and SCOBY caregiver Marcela Godoy, this workshop will introduce and demonstrate how to make kombucha, a tea fermented in collaboration with bacteria and yeast. Participants will also discuss their memories of keeping something alive, from heirlooms to recipes to other organisms, by sharing it with others.
FIELD TRIP
Visiting Sanlin Old Street & Traditional Pickles
- Saturday, 16 November, 14–16:00
Who do you come from? Who do you carry with you? Inspired by these questions asked by Mirna Bamieh in Sour Things, we embark on a field trip to neighboring Sanlin Town to learn about where we are situated and about who and what came before us. Discover the history of Sanlin Old Street on a guided walking tour with docent LI Qing, and then visit Sanlin Traditional Pickles, where third-generation pickle master JIN Ruijun shares the art and history of local pickling. Learn about traditional techniques and their stories in this immersive experience blending history, culture, and culinary legacies.
All events are FREE and OPEN to the public.
For further details and to register for events, please visit the event pages under Related programs below.
The exhibition Sour Things and related events are presented as the first season of the ICA's artistic research program Lightless Fires (2024–26), exploring fermentation as a figure and technique of collective memory, autonomous archiving, and writing history.
Sour Things, an exhibition by Mirna Bamieh, is organized by Michelle Yeonho Hyun with BAO Yang and ZHU Sicong, with additional support by ZHANG Yiying, PENG Linru, ZHANG Shuhan, and YUAN Ruoxuan. Special thanks to Wael Accad, DIAO Wei, FAN Jiayin, Marcela Godoy, HE Yitao, JIN Ruijin, LI Qing, LI Xin, SU Ziying, and Non-Material Studio/YU Bing. Design by LIU Anqi.
Additional support generously provided by Eli Falafel, Maolago, and NIKA Project Space.
