On February 21st, 2024, Inside the Belly of the Beast unfolded as a visceral culinary performance, marking the second iteration of Thil by artist Nahla Tabbaa. This immersive experience, supported by Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation (DBF), invited audiences into a world where food became a medium for storytelling, resistance, and remembrance. Two of Nahla’s works were installed in the space; I Sit Under Your Shade (2022) and Thil (2024), creating a deepened understanding of how audiences can engage and interact with work
About Thil
Thil—Arabic for “shadow”—is an iterative installation born from grief and anger over the genocide in Gaza in 2023. Conceived during the artist’s residency at MMAG, Thil took shape as a mythical creature embodying both our collective shadow and rage against injustice.
In 2024, as part of a journey seeking enlightenment, the artist traversed Jordan, seeking solace and answers in nature, folklore, mythology, and the Quran. She explored seasonal shifts and invasive plants as emblems of resilience, recognizing that nature, too, bears witness to human atrocities. As echoed in the Quran, the trees and rocks will one day speak—and through an intuitive artistic process, the artist’s drawings of rocks and trees began to take on watchful eyes. The culmination of this journey is a constellation of symbolic tree branches, flowers, textiles, and ceramics, woven together in an evocative exploration of memory and resistance.
Thil was produced in 2024 and supported by MMAG Foundation, Amman, Jordan and was first shown as part of the exhibition; Lives Orbit in Mourning at MMAG Foundation.
A Culinary Reimagining
In Inside the Belly of the Beast, the artist embarked on a culinary residency, imagining what the insides of such a formidable entity would taste like. The resulting hybrid foods trace their origins to pivotal moments in Bangladesh’s history—famine, partition, and liberation—while also reflecting the artist’s homeland, which is currently experiencing war and famine. The performance honored wild and indigenous plants from both regions, creating dishes that straddled trauma and joy, grief and celebration.
By invoking food as a conduit for memory and resilience, Inside the Belly of the Beast extended an invitation to collectively witness, taste, and remember, forging a sensory bridge between past and present struggles.
About the Menu
Bangladesh, the artist’s motherland, has been a beacon of resilience, demonstrating time and time again the strength of collective resistance. The performance ties in personal narratives and research conducted in Bangladesh, tracing parallels between histories of struggle and survival across regions. She conducted this research during her micro-residency, with the guidance and support of Mishak Ahmed and his team at Secrets Bangladesh.
Six months into the genocide in Gaza, the artist was in Jordan, paralyzed by grief and rage. Having just completed a culinary and farming degree, she found herself unable to engage with food while witnessing famine unfold in a shared land. As a response, she committed to working exclusively with wild plants native to Jordan and Palestine—plants that sustained communities during times of devastation. This practice evolved into a broader exploration of survival foods, those born from trauma, partition, famine, and grief, and the ways they deserve to be honored and remembered.
The performance took place under a mythical creature constructed by the artist—Thil, a being that embodies rage and the collective shadow. In Arabic, there is a saying: ya rab tanshak al 2ard wa tibla3kom—“May God open up the earth and swallow us whole.” The artist conceived Thil as a force capable of swallowing colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, and oppression. This performance invites the audience to experience the biblical and metaphorical sensation of being swallowed by a beast, navigating through a symbolic anatomy built from historical and culinary elements.
Culinary Narratives and Symbolism
The dishes presented reflect both historical and mythological references. The first set of dishes were incorporated directly onto the table, with the foods mimicking the installed artwork, and as the courses began to land on the table, Nahla presented a series of stories and metaphors that led her to think about how the dishes were connected to Thil and the state of the world.
The first course; Ceviche, originating in Mesopotamia under the name Sakbaj, describes a method of curing meat in vinegar. The flesh of a fish, stripped and suddenly cured, embodies both violence and transformation—cooked without fire, yet changed through acid. The behtki fish in this performance has been cured with lemons, oranges, hibiscus, and saffron, paying homage to both the artist’s regions. Its appearance under a Chitha Pithia ‘fishing net’ was so pink, it began to resemble the flesh of Thil.
The artist’s reconnection with her homeland after years of absence was marked by an immersion in its natural cycles. During her hikes, she was struck by the contrast between the vividness of spring and the concurrent human suffering. Enraged by nature’s seemingly indifferent beauty, she began to depict landscapes where trees and rocks bore witness—each imbued with watchful eyes. The Quranic verse stating that, on the Day of Judgment, trees and rocks will speak reinforced this vision. The soup presented in the performance, paired with aloo bhorta stones, incorporates wild leafy greens abundant in both Jordan and Bangladesh, sourced and foraged for this specific gathering.
As the artist delved deeper into the intersections of memory and rage, she abandoned the need for self-censorship. She embraced the sacredness of anger and the necessity of confronting inherited colonial legacies. Mother, a trio of comfort foods, represents nurturing and protection—each dish wrapped in an outer layer, embracing its core just as one must embrace their shadow.
The final course, a three-part dessert centered around mishti doi, embodies resilience. The fermentation of milk and yogurt symbolizes transformation and survival. The artist draws a parallel between Zionism’s attempts to eradicate a people and the regenerative power of the oppressed—an echo of the Greek myth of Hydra, where every severed head grows back in threes. Just as weeds persist, so too does the will to survive.
Through this performance, the artist invites the audience to taste, witness, and reflect on histories of survival, resistance, and transformation—inside the belly of the beast.
To Drink
Salt| Black Lime (Loomi) and Tamarind
Sweat| Kaacha Aamer Rosh
Tears| Sage, Faijun and Roo Hafza
To Nibble/ directly served as a tablescape
Herding the Sun| Marigold and Pumpkin Flower Tempura with Dukkah
Wailing Maw| Spiced Ghee Candles
The Hide is a Shroud| Shraak Bread
Damm| Beetroot and Kishkeh (dried yoghurt and burghul wheat) Dip
The Skin of Thyme| Zaatar (thyme, sumac and sesame seeds) and Kishkeh Paratha
Grove Stones| Spiced Olives and Kat Badam with Kashundi
Lament| Roasted Vine Leafs, Helencha Shak, Kalme Shak, Kotu Pata
To Feast
Flesh| Bhetki ceviche with Hibiscus, Oranges and Tokma
Stung and Healed| Stinging Nettle, Khubaizeh, Helencha Shak, Kalme Shak, soup with Aloo Bhorta Gnocchi
Mother| Ilish Pulao stuffed Vine Leafs, Chicken Paan with Pomegranate Molasses, Kitchree Arancini with Dhaka Cheese
I’ll Grow Back in Threes| Mishti Doi with Hazelnut Praline, Ovaltine and Kataifi noodles
Phool| Hand sculpted Gur Sondesh Mishti
About I Sit Under your Shade
I Sit Under Your Shade is a series of gestural drawings that function as sundials, tracing alternative passages of time through a tree’s shifting shadows. Created through urgent mark-making, the works document an intangible language and an ancient construct of time. The choice of tree is deliberate, selected through meditation, mapping, and visits to sites where light moves dynamically. The first iteration emerged in 2021 during the SEAF fellowship, with months spent observing a tree outside the studio, its swaying form casting ever-changing shadows.
A year later, a new iteration was commissioned in Jordan. At the time, balancing artistic practice, rest, and a full-time job was nearly impossible. Ironically, the commission required travel home and mandated sitting under a tree—turning an ordinary moment of pause into a rare privilege. Under a 60-year-old sour plum tree in a family garden, a rolled canvas was placed on the ground, shadows were quickly marked with charcoal, then the canvas was pulled and the process repeated. The result was a shadow drawing in constant flux, capturing the sun’s movement minute by minute.
This fleeting yet profound encounter led to the decision to return home after a decade away. In April 2024, the roots of a pine tree caused the collapse of a family home’s wall, destroying the tree entirely. Once ephemeral gestures, these works have become enduring portraits—outliving the trees that inspired them.
I Sit Under Your Shade was commissioned by 421 for On Foraging: Food Knowledge and Environmental Imaginaries in the UAE’s Landscape in 2022 and it was also showcased at the 10th edition of Colomboscope: Way of the Forest in 2024.
The 3rd Edition of I Sit Under Your Shade has been acquired by DBF.
About Nahla Tabbaa
Nahla Tabbaa (b.1986) is a Jordanian Bangladeshi interdisciplinary artist, chef, educator and programmes curator whose practice explores tensions between the urban and the organic, the beautiful and the grotesque. Sensitive to the self-organising agency of materials, she adventures into the world of immateriality and the intangible through experiments in alchemy and combining elements from the organic and inorganic. Her methods are intentionally slow-paced, meditative and labour-intensive and permeate strands of her everyday life to heal and harmonise her otherwise fast-paced life. As an act of resistance, she leans into alternative constructs of time and ancient practices as a way to summon magic in the mundane everyday. She sees our present state as a catastrophic dystopian world that can no longer be dismantled with human hands, but rather, she is seeking wisdom in the more-than-human world. Through working with invasive and indigenous plants, plant medicine, hiking, animal care and reading into regional mythology and folklore, her work moves towards a place where she can propose a new system of radical care and the sacred.
Her mediums are sculpture, drawing, alchemy, research and the culinary arts.
She earned her BFA in Sculpture (Central Saint Martin’s College, 2009) and Curatorial Practice (Bath School of Art and Design, 2012), she recently completed a culinary and farming diploma at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Cork, Ireland (2023). She is an alumna of Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artist Fellowship (2021), Campus Art Dubai (2020) and MMAG (2024). Her multidisciplinary works and publications have been presented at Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation (2025), MMAG (2024), Doha Design Biennial (2024), Colomboscope (2024), Alserkal Arts Foundation (2023), 421 (2022), Art Dubai (2021) and the Jameel Arts Centre (2022). She has founded and curated social pedagogical projects including Orraisse (2024-present), Rewilding The Kitchen (2021- present), The Alchemy of Dyeing (2020-2023) and Daftar Asfar (2017-2022).
In the culinary world she has led performance dinners and explorations at 421 with Moza almatrooshi, Al Serkal Avenue, Art Dubai with Augustine Paredes, Art Dubai with Fernando Garcia Dory, Myocum and Amman Design Week, and has curated Sufra with Frying Pan Adventures and Rewilding the Kitchen- with AlSerkal Arts Foundation. She has published recipes which have featured in EastEast Magazine, The Confused Arab, Deep Fried and Attempting Abla Nazira.
Nahla is currently based between Amman and Dubai.
