What´s for dinner?
(2022)
What’s for dinner? looks at dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins beyond the human body, tracing how these chemicals shape behaviour across species — from optimism in starlings and social bonding in orcas to aggression in honeybees and hibernation in brown bears. Drawing on scientific diagrams and behavioural studies, the exhibition gives visual form to these microscopic processes, unsettling the idea that emotions such as hope, attachment or anticipation belong exclusively to us.
Against a culture increasingly invested in managing mood, productivity and ‘wellness’, these biological mechanisms become a way of questioning how much control we actually exercise over how we feel. Moving between scientific research, humour and speculation, What’s for dinner? approaches the pursuit of feeling better as a recurring biological loop: anticipation, reward, satisfaction, decline — and the inevitable desire for whatever comes next.
Toad on the Moon takes the ‘boiling frog’ metaphor as a point of departure: the false but persistent belief that a frog will remain in slowly heated water until it boils. The exhibition uses this fiction to consider how gradual deterioration can become normalised, and how adaptation can shift from a means of survival into a form of inertia.
The title draws on myths that locate the figure of a toad on the moon, where it appears in stories of transformation, immortality and escape. Between the warming water and the moon, the exhibition traces a tension between endurance and withdrawal, asking when adaptation becomes acceptance, and when escape might offer another way of responding to an increasingly uninhabitable present.