25–30.8. Kitchen Testimonies: Something in the Mouth

Aug 29

3 min read

Kitchen Testimonies

Something in the Mouth

25–30.8.2026

11:00-17:00

Kitchen Testimonies, Doğa Çal's nomadic artistic and culinary practice, engages dietary access and social relations around eating. Something in the Mouth invites visitors to inhabit a playground where the unexamined assumptions one brings to dining are actively destabilised through material interventions that question the boundaries and notions of the “edible,” “typical,” and “natural”.

Throughout the exhibition, familiar foods are defamiliarised while handmade ceramic fragments welcome new ways of eating or being fed. Acting as both metaphor and affect, re-nestled fruit pits refuse disposability. Their texture and taste anchor sensory focus while also holding bodily knowledge and the residues of care and time. Meanwhile, glitter drifts across surfaces as a material personifying cross-contamination and croissant candles burn and slowly disappear (one of the many baked goods Çal can never taste).

The exhibition moves between grief and playfulness: grief connected to lost foods, privatised seeds, tenebrous food futures, shifting rituals, shaken trust, and altered forms of gathering. And play as a way of testing new relationships to food, the body, and one another. In doing so, Something in the Mouth asks what accessibility reveals about the table itself, what structures of belonging it presumes, and what it has rendered invisible or impossible.

Special thanks to Anaya Sathe (Arthea Studio) for the croissant candles and to Özgü Gündeşlioğlu for ceramic stoneware guidance and contribution.

The exhibition is curated by Dahlia El Broul.

Kitchen Testimonies is a nomadic artistic and culinary practice conceived by Doğa Çal. It reconfigures itself around kitchens, food, and eating through different participants and forms of participation. Moving between exhibitions, performances, workshops, pop-ups, and catering, the practice pays particular attention to dietary access and to the social relations that form around eating.

Doğa Çal (she/they) is a Helsinki-based artist working across socially engaged art, installation, performance, moving image, and participatory practices. Her work often begins from everyday situations and bodily experience, using food, gathering, domestic space, and practices of care as sites for examining belonging, access, trust, and the conditions through which people relate to one another.

Dahlia El Broul (she/they) is a curator, educator, and artist based in Espoo, originally from New York City. Her work moves across cultural production engaging with critical political inquiries, pedagogy, publishing, and collective imaginaries through feminist and dialogical methods. She has curated exhibitions in Helsinki and New York; most recently Multitudes of Blue (2025) at Photographic Gallery Hippolyte. Dahlia is currently completing her doctorate on children's picturebooks at the HFBK Hamburg, supported by the Kone Foundation.

Doğa Çal’s work is kindly supported by Circus Maximus with funding from the City of Helsinki.

List of Works

You Can Eat This?

Charcoal and black cookies.

2026