Honi Ryan: Solo Show 'Silent Dinners’ at Project 8 Gallery in Melbourne

Visit Honi Ryan’s solo show and attend a silent dinner performance on the 14th July in Melbourne

Exhibition 17th June – 22th July

Project 8 Gallery: Level 2/417 Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000, Australia

Silent Dinner Performance 14th July
(by reservation only: HERE)

“As the dinner party commenced, it seemed as though everyone’s inhibitions were cast out the window instantly!”
- Anonymous, Sydney, 2009

Image: Honi Ryan, ‘Silent Dinner 58 - Project8 Gallery Melbourne, 2023’.

Photos by Lucy Foster @lu_spent

The Silent Dinners (2006–23) is an international participatory performance project based around a group meal. It has to  date comprised 58 events in 20 cities across 12 countries.

The guests are requested:

Please do not use words or your voice
Please don’t read or write
Try to make as little noise as possible
Don’t interact with digital devices
Stay for 2 hours.

This exhibition looks over the 16-year history of the Silent Dinner project through performances, automatist paintings in reflection of previous events, photographs, performance artefacts, participant responses, an audio recording, sculptural elements accumulated on site, and various material representations of collated data and inventory.

Honi Ryan, ‘Memories of Silence 8 i–iii: Nantong’

The series of paintings ‘Memories of Silence’ in the exhibition are each created in response to a past ‘Silent Dinner’ performance. They are made through an automatic painting technique developed by the artist using the inventory data of the performances and the colour palettes of the photos and memories of past events to build guidelines to create works on paper as performance documents.

Honi Ryan @honiryan ‘Silent Dinners: Hosted Fragments’ Wooden table, clay bake fragments.

Ceramic meal artefacts by Jia Jia Chen and @fluffcorp

Photos by Lucy Foster @lu_spent

The sculptural work changes and grows over the course of the exhibition. The broken ceramic pieces accumulating on the table are performance remnants from the current series of ‘Silent Dinners.’ Participants are served clay baked food, which they break open to eat. The remnants of the bake are collected and accumulate after each performance.

The clay bake is a signature dish of the food and ceramic artist who designed and developed the menu for the current Silent Dinners, Jia Jia Chen @jiajiachen. They are collated and arranged by Honi Ryan to represent the many individual participants that have embodied the ‘Silent Dinner’ project over its 16-year history.

Video by: @colorfieldproduction

Honi Ryan, ‘Silent Dinner 50 - Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery Pantin, Jeune Création 70’

Honi Ryan is an artist, writer, and educator with a nomadic social practice. She uses techniques for mindfulness as performative guidelines on everyday activities, creating heightened encounters in daily life. Her work was recently included in Creative Paths at Gaiás Museum Galicia, Spain alongside artists including Francis Alÿs, Mona Hatoum and Marina Abramović. Born in Melbourne and based between Berlin and Paris, Ryan is also adjunct faculty at Paris College of Art.

More information about the artist: https://www.honiryan.net/

Silent Dinner Archive Blog: https://silentdinnerparty.com/blog/