Food Art Week, created by artist/chef Tainá Guedes in 2015, is a non-profit project, whose mission is to promote positive change in our environment and society by asking how ‘what we eat and how we eat it’ is irrevocably affecting our environment.

Through video, installation, performance, photography, and design, the diversity of works brought together for WATER(PROOF), the exhibition of contemporary art for Food Art Week 2019: WATER, engage in a broader international dialogue on the deterioration of our environment. Shaarbek Amankul’s video "New Society", documents the devastating ironies of economic privation in his native Kyrgystan, where poor villagers drain the contents of water bottles into the arid earth, preferring the quick cash from recycling to the water itself. Renowned environmental artist Janet Laurence addresses the fragility of water as a vital resource through her installation H2O: Water Bar. Stefano Cagol’s video performance amidst the ice of the arctic circle, "Evoke, Provoke (the border)", raises issues of mankind’s unrelenting impact upon even the harshest of environments. Almagul Menlibayeva’s photo series illustrates this year’s Food Art Week, while her film, "Transoxiana Dreams", documents the desertification of the Aral Sea, poetically following the plight of fishermen who now have to drive for hours from their village to reach the rapidly shrinking sea. Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus’s video performance "Salt Dinner" is set within another shrinking sea, Israel’s Dead Sea. What looks like an absurd aquatic picnic is in truth a brutal endurance test for both artists, the excess of salt they are consuming with the sea water being as lethally dehydrating as the midday sun. Nina E. Schönefeld’s video "Dark Waters" takes place in another poison sea. Set in a dystopian future where the oceans are poisoned with plastic and only jellyfish can survive in their waters, this sadly bears more resemblance to truth than science fiction. Shingo Yoshida’s film "Réprouvé" is striking for its very absence of water; turning a garbage strewn wasteland in Chile into a beautiful sound installation, it is nevertheless a frightening glimpse of what our planet may soon look like if we do not take better care of our most necessary natural resource - water. These and the other outstanding works in this exhibition for Food Art Week may be only tangentially about food, and yet each work illustrates in its own way the vast diversity in which water impacts upon the cycle of life on our planet. From the desertification of climate change to the predicted floods of melting glaciers, water is as deadly in its scarcity as it is in excess. And yet, life cannot exist without it. Water(Proof) is about such paradoxes. In our utter dependence on water, we nevertheless contrive to poison and squander it. Nothing is waterproof, in the sense of being impervious to water, when water is perceived as integral to most every industry which sustains our lifestyles and quality of life. Yet our lifestyles are poisoning our planet. Water(Proof) assembles the positions and experiences of twenty international artists, each proving, in their own way, the precarious paradoxes of the cycles of water consumption and production.