Open Call for Artists

Claypots: Food, Body and Memory invites artists to contribute to an exhibition exploring the claypot and food ingredients as material culture, living archives, and vessels of memory.

Across Africa, the claypot has endured through generations — not simply as an object of utility, but as a repository of knowledge, identity, and cultural continuity. It embodies histories of nourishment, spirituality, healing, care, and communal life, while standing as a quiet act of resistance against the forces of colonialism, industrialisation, and globalisation that have sought to erase indigenous ways of living and knowing.

This exhibition centres the stories embedded within claypots and the women whose labour, knowledge, and practices have sustained these traditions across generations. It also considers the cultural, social, and historical significance of hibiscus, turmeric, and jute leaves as carriers of memory, migration, trade, medicine, ritual, and nourishment. Together, these materials prompt us to consider how food preserves history, how everyday objects become archives, and how food traditions shape collective identity.

We invite artists working across disciplines to respond to these ideas through new or existing works.

Selected artists will become part of a broader programme that extends beyond the exhibition through collective cooking sessions, conversations, workshops, screenings, and artist talks, creating opportunities for audiences to actively engage with the histories, practices, and traditions explored in the exhibition.

We welcome practices that critically, poetically, or experimentally engage with the relationships between food, body, memory, and the enduring cultural significance of the claypot within African contexts.