PRESS RELEASE: Honi Ryan: Silent Dinners

Honi Ryan
Silent Dinners

Exhibition: 17 June – 22 July 2023
Opening: 16 June 2023, 6–8 pm

Performances: 15 June, 30 June, 14 July 7:30–9:30 pm
Performances by reservation at www.silentdinner.net/rsvp

Project8 Gallery presents a special exhibition and performance program in June and July to mark their one-year anniversary. For this anniversary exhibition Cūrā8 have dedicated the gallery to the Silent Dinner project, conceived and developed by Berlin and Paris based artist Honi Ryan.

The Silent Dinners (2006–23) is an international participatory performance project based around a three-course meal. It has to date comprised 57 events in 20 cities across 12 countries—Australia, China, England, France, Germany, Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, Scotland, Spain, the UAE and the US.

The exhibition will bookend 16 years of global Silent Dinner events through performances and an exuberant constellation of original indexical paintings, photographs drawn from previous Silent Dinner events around the world, performance artefacts, intercultural anecdotal memories, audio recordings, sculptural elements, and various material representations of data and inventory, both from the history of the project and accumulated on site.

Three Silent Dinner events will be open for public booking, leading to the landmark 60th Silent Dinner occurring during the run of the exhibition. Participation is by reservation only at www.silentdinner.net/rsvp

The Silent Dinner performance guidelines have remained consistent across 16 years. Participants are asked to refrain from using words or voice, agree to neither read nor write, to try to make as little noise as possible, to avoid interacting with digital technologies, and finally, to commit to staying with the experience for at least 2 hours. Participation has, to date, ranged from 2–200 people at each performance.

Variously described as nomadic social practice, social sculpture and mindful social performance, the Silent Dinners have summed to form an extraordinary intercultural study of dynamic real-space communication. The Silent Dinner project simultaneously transcends and celebrates cultural differences, while revealing humanity’s global similarities.

Vulnerabilities present at the beginning of each meal characteristically give way to new forms of human-to-human connection and play. Importantly, its shared durational quality is central, facilitating a shared commitment to a collective journey.

Honi Ryan is an artist, writer, and educator with a nomadic social practice and is currently adjunct faculty in the graduate school of Paris College of Art. Significantly, Ryan’s work was recently included in ‘Creative Paths’ at Gaiás Museum Galicia, Spain alongside artists including Francis Alÿs, Mona Hatoum and Marina Abramović. Working with long-term social performance as medium, Ryan creates and illuminates encounters between people and place in everyday life.

For this exhibition and performative event series at Project8, the Silent Dinners are presented as part of a new collaboration with Chinese-born Australian ceramicist Jia Jia Chen, who has developed and tested her practice across a mutually informing engagement with art, design and food. Chen’s clay bake dinners will feature as both performance elements and documentation in this exhibition.

Bookings to participate in the three Silent Dinner performances to be held at Project8 are open at the link below, and close one week before each event.

Volunteers are being sought to work on the Silent Dinner performances. Interested parties should contact [email protected]

CONTACT

Silent Dinner Bookings: www.silentdinner.net/rsvp
Silent Dinner Enquiries: [email protected]

Project8 Gallery
Wurundjeri Country
Level 2, 417 Collins St.
Melbourne, VIC
AUSTRALIA

11am—6pm
Wednesday—Saturday
or by appointment
+61 3 9380 8888

More information
www.project8.gallery
Instagram and Facebook @project8gallery
Press and additional promotional images contact [email protected]

Image credits:
1. Honi Ryan, Silent Dinner 42, social performance, Karachi Biennale, 2017. Photo by Humayun M.
2. Honi Ryan, Silent Dinner 50, social performance, Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, Paris-Pantin, 2021. Photo by Chris Lee.