Germaine Koh’s artistic practice investigates the systems and structures that underpin and shape human behaviour. She adapts familiar objects, everyday actions, and common spaces to create situations that allow for an exploration of communal experience. Soupson is a mobile food cart and a site for gathering. Designed with an irregular seven-sided surface and an electric hot pot at its centre, a set of stoneware bowls hand-formed by community members, and seven upcycled stools, Soupson was conceived to share artist-made soups. Like much of Koh’s work, Soupson blurs the boundary between the space of the museum and its outside environments and actively intervenes in the Gibson's day-to-day operations, contravening a widely held “no food in the galleries” policy to test and expand the institution’s own practices.
Soup is a near universal form of sustenance, almost like language itself: in one form or another, it has been nourishing people since pre-historic times. While some soups are recognizable the world over, others are almost exclusively experienced in their region of origin. Soups are also profoundly hospitable, because they can always be “stretched thinner” to nourish additional guests. Following the close of Edge Effects, Soupson will remain a part of the Gibson’s ongoing programming, activated by future artists to share their own soup recipes—and the stories that accompany them—with others. Koh inaugurates Soupson with borscht, one of her favourite soups, chosen in part because its vibrant pink colour corresponds with the Gibson’s design identity.
Soupson is active on the first Thursday of every month at midday. The soup is shared until the pot is empty. Everyone is welcome, and the soup is free.
