UPCOMING EVENT
Rujuta Rao: BAR soro
Friday, September 13, 2024 at 6:00pm, 6:30pm, 7:00pm, and 7:30pm
Reserve tickets here through Eventbrite. We are offering timed tickets for each 20-minute session and the capacity is limited to 4 people per session. The evening will consist of 4 sessions starting at 6:00, 6:30, 7:00, and 7:30. Guests are welcome to linger after their session wraps up.
As part of our commitment to paying artists, we are charging $15 for admission. Please contact the gallery via email if you are unable to pay the entrance fee and we can offer you a free or reduced ticket.
Parent Company is pleased to announce an event led by the artist Rujuta Rao. In this participatory installation, Rao invites the audience to experience artworks from a menu across a bar counter. The menu includes the Goan distilled beverage cashew feni, an edible pairing, artworks, artist books, and printed matter made by Rao.
The works included in the menus encapsulate Rao’s learning of cashew feni while drawing parallels between its history and her family’s migration to Goa. They were made alongside studying the production of cashew feni, its role within Goa’s social fabric, its use in ceremonies, rituals, and for medicinal purposes, and its history which begins with the cashew plant which was brought by Portuguese colonialists from Brazil to India.
This format of exhibition is an extension of Rao’s practice of creating and sharing tactile artworks for individual viewers, her past experience as a bartender, and her training as a Japanese sake advisor. More about Rao’s ongoing BAR series can be read in the accompanying text contributed by Laurel V. McLaughlin.
Rujuta Rao was born in Goa, India, and is based in Jersey City, NJ. Rao's multidisciplinary practice spans sculpture, installation, performance, book and sound art, alongside conceptual and functional garments. Her practice is research-led and intensely personal, investigating the fragility and limitations of materials relating to place, family history, and hospitality. Rao received her MFA in interdisciplinary art from Parsons School of Design and BFA in sculpture from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. She is a certified Japanese sake advisor and is presently awaiting her sake sommelier exam. Artist residencies and fellowships include CCA Islands Travel Fellowship, Japan; ISSP Riga Residency, Latvia; Civita Institute Fellowship, Italy; and The Rejoinders Residency, UK. Rao is a 2024 Workspace Artist in Residence at the Center for Book Arts in New York, where she is developing wearable publications. Rao’s work has been exhibited internationally, with a recent highlight being the State of Fashion Biennale 2024 in Arnhem, NL, where she macerated her family’s garments in ethyl alcohol to create fictional tinctures.