Roast vermin with a side of Japanese knotweed may not be everyone’s idea of a gourmet meal, but it will be one of the celebrity chef dishes on offer at this year’s Frieze London art fair.
Billed as an “avant-garde Borough Market”, a specially commissioned pavilion at the event will host of dinners, performances and food stalls designed to “explore the relationship between art, cooking and eating”.
Sam Clark, of Moro restaurant, will be cooking the vermin and knotweed dishes which will be served to guests in the main section of the pavilion, while members of the public can watch from a viewing platform.
It is the first time that Frieze, being staged for the 10th time, has featured food as art. Matthew Slotover, founder and director of the fair, said: “It’s going to be a bit wild and unpredictable but it’s one of the things I’m most excited about this year.”
The project is a collaboration between the Yangjiang Group collective from China and the Grizedale Arts project in the Lake District, which is located on a working farm and often merges food and art.
Grizedale Arts invited the Yangjiang Group to build a new cricket pavilion for the nearby village of Coniston and the resulting prototype has been named After Dinner Shu Fa at Cricket Pavilion. It has been transported to Regent’s Park.
Alistair Hudson, of Grizedale, said: “The theme is around food and the use of food in society; food is a great leveller but we also wanted to explore the fetishisation of food. The chefs are all going to be cooking things that are very easily obtained and cheap, which will be set against the context of the super-wealth of the art world.
“Sam Clark is going to be seeing what is around on the day, but it could be something like Canada goose, Japanese knotweed and honey fungus.”
The pavilion and the main Frieze fair open on Thursday.
