“I am looking for something very specific,” Zayan, the founder of the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, told me. I had spotted him standing near a large abstract painting saying something about lettuce to a booth attendant. Zayan was searching for food. Art and food, to be precise - works that examine their relationship, shared humanity, social tensions - as he curates the second edition of the NAFAS Festival in Tokyo this September. In Arabic, nafas means breath or a sustaining force, and captures the nurturing energy that goes into cooking.
'As the USAID was dismantled under the Trump administration, the critiques of development projects that typically come from the left began to mirror some of the administration's rationales.'