Change the Way You Think About Food

The Turner Prize-Nominated Art Collective Cooking Sections Wants to Change the Way You Think About Food

Salmon is usually thought of as pink. The colour is even called ‘salmon pink’. However, farmed salmon today would be grey. To make them the expected colour, synthetic pigments are added to their feed. As Cooking Sections put it, salmon is ‘the colour of a wild fish which is neither wild, nor fish, nor even salmon’. Salmon are farmed in open nets, which severely impact wild salmon populations and marine life across the seabed of the west coast of Scotland.

The changing colours of species are warning signs of an environmental crisis. Many of these alterations result from humans and animals ingesting and absorbing synthetic substances. Changes in flesh, scales, feathers, skin, leaves or wings give us clues to environmental and metabolic transformations around us and inside us. This installation questions what colours we expect in our ‘natural’ environment as our planet changes.

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/cooking-sections

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/cooking-sections-turner-prize-1993643

The group’s long-term projects often have no end date, making them an anomaly in the art world.