ABOUT
Tuesday, April 22, 6:00 – 7:30 pm, Alan and Rebecca Ross Education Wing, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at MSU
How does food shape our cultural connections? Join artist and chef Carmel Bar and multidisciplinary designer Michal Evyatar as they introduce Studio Mela, their multi-sensory art and design studio based in Israel.
Carmel Bar and Michal Evytar transform food into a dynamic artistic medium, exploring its potential beyond mere sustenance. Their innovative installations blend movement, design, and sensory experience, revealing food as a complex language of personal and cultural narratives. Exhibited internationally, their works challenge traditional perceptions, treating culinary ingredients as living materials that carry color, texture, and emotional depth. Through their art, Bar and Evytar invite viewers to experience art through their entire body.
Bar and Evyatar present “Vanitas: Archive of Arrested Decay.” In this delicate dance of decay and conservation, food hardens and shifts, revealing not only its physical substance but a cultural imprint—an unspoken testament of agricultural landscapes, human touch, and collective memory. Mummification becomes a futile attempt to arrest the inevitable, with each preserved specimen testifying to our human desire to resist impermanence. Here, the museum becomes a temple of preservation, extending its sacred duty to safeguard not just artifacts, but culinary heritage. The work invites viewers to witness the ephemeral journey of sustenance: from raw potential to momentary form, then dissolving, leaving behind only memory and meaning.
What Bar and Evyatar produce will be on view in the Alan and Rebecca Ross Education Wing at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum from April 23 to 27th, after their lecture/performance/exhibit on April 22nd.
This program is part of an exciting collaboration between the Serling Institute for Jewish Studies and Modern Israel and the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum and is part of one of the museum’s themes this semester which is centered around questions of food knowledge, production, scarcity, and consumption against the background of Michigan State University’s 170-year history of agricultural tradition.
Michal Evyatar is a multisensorial designer and chef who received her M.des at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel. Carmel Beer is an artist, dancer, performer and pastry chef who received her education, directed by Claudia Castellucci, at the Conia School, Cesena, Italy and at the School of Visual Theater, Jerusalem, Israel. Carmel and Michal have had exhibitions in Germany, Israel, Poland, Ukraine, and throughout the United States.