Nahla Tabbaa is a Jordanian Bangladeshi interdisciplinary artist, chef and curator whose practice explores tensions between the urban and the organic, the beautiful and the grotesque. Sensitive to the self-organising agency of materials, she adventures into the world of immateriality and the intangible through experiments in alchemy and combining elements from the organic and inorganic. Her mediums are sculpture, drawing, alchemy, research and the culinary arts.

In this six-day workshop, participants will sit closely with edible staples to the Pakistani diet and explore what it means to find “comfort” in these foods.

From understanding their nutritional value, their impact on the body and soul, how they are emotional and social vessels, but also, perhaps their controversial, labour intensive and colonial pasts, participants will come together to write a culinary guide that is robust and honest, straddling fiction, humour and our emotional and bodily relationships with these foods.

As a final offering, participants will create an edible installation, inviting audiences of the Indus Conclave to participate and taste their retold stories of these foods.

Sessions will be conducted in English.