Claypots, Food, and the Body: What to Expect at KAFART’s Flagship Exhibition

Ahead of the sixth edition of the Kaduna Fashion and Art Festival, exhibition notes shared with The Moveee detail the thinking behind Claypots: Food, Body and Memory – the flagship show that will anchor this year’s “To Have and to Hold” theme when the festival opens in Kaduna from November 22 to 25.

There is a certain kind of obstinacy in a claypot. The claypot has persisted well beyond the age of industrial cookware and well beyond the attempts of colonial administrations to reconfigure the functioning of African households.

That recurrence is the only theme of Kaduna Fashion and Art Festival’s flagship exhibition this year. Claypots: Food, Body and Memory will present the vessel not as an artefact of a simpler past but as evidence of refusal. Over generations and across parts of Africa, the claypot has survived colonialism, industrialisation and globalisation. Each of these forces, in its own way, has tried to convince people that their old ways of doing things are worth giving up. The exhibition asks: what does it mean that so many people did not abandon them?

Women are central to that history. The claypot has always been linked with nutrition, spirituality and femininity and the knowledge of it has been passed down almost exclusively through the hands of mothers, grandmothers and healers. It is knowledge acquired through doing and repetition, not documents, and that may be just why it has had such a hard time making its way into official histories. This exhibition is, in part, an attempt to correct that omission, to give weight to labour that has largely gone uncredited and to the communal gatherings that labour made possible.

There is a second material inquiry along the claypot, three ingredients of food, hibiscus, turmeric and jute, each chosen with intention. All three have crossed borders through centuries of trade and migration. All three have meanings that go far beyond the plate, showing up in medicine, ritual and spiritual practice across the continent. The exhibition uses them to ask a harder question: what does it mean to cook with materials that have survived the same erasures as the claypot? In this framing, food will become less a question of taste and more a question of continuity, a way in which ingredients can hold memory in the same way that objects can.

The artistic response will take shape through clay works, installations and textile pieces, mediums that are embodied practices and in themselves old, historically rooted in the same communities the exhibition is drawing from. Contemporary art will not reinvent the claypot or the ingredients here, but will place them in the present and ask what they still mean today.

That inquiry does not stay within the confines of the gallery wall. Public programming that runs through the exhibition, such as collective cooking sessions, food reflections, film screenings, workshops and artist talks, drives the work into lived experience. Visitors will be asked first to look and then to also take part in the same traditions the exhibition is examining.

The exhibition will serve as a starting point for a series of discussion sessions to be held during the sixth edition of the Kaduna Fashion and Art Festival more broadly: on the role of art in society, on the factory of Kaduna Textile Limited that once had a collective dream, on craftsmanship as resistance in African communities, and on the donkey skin trade from a decolonial perspective. Together, they will extend Claypots: Food, Body and Memory beyond one exhibition and into a larger reckoning that KAFART is having this year with what is held onto and what is lost in the process.