TEL AVIV.- Table Manners is a unique project at the University Gallery, on art, theater and food. The exhibition engages with food and its place in culture and presents works of art that reflect social behavior through one of the most basic human activities. The art exhibition and the theater plays accompanying it examine the tension between primal instincts and bodily sensations linked to food and its refinement, design and aesthetization.

Table Manners is the product of a collaboration between the department of Art History and the department of Theater Arts at the Faculty of the Arts at Tel Aviv University. Its head curators are Chair of the Art History Department, Dr. Sefy Hendler and Chair of the Theater Arts Department, Dr. Sharon Aronson-Lehavi.

Table Manners includes an exhibition of contemporary art by Israeli and international artists curated by NIrith Nelson, the staging of two of Jeannine Worms’s culinary plays The Recipe (La Recette 1983), and Coffee and Cake (Le Goûter 1971), directed, designed, and performed by students of the Theater Arts Department, culinary events curated by Ronit Vered as well as a series of lectures, film showings and encounters with scholars from various disciplines on the topics of food, society and culture.

The art exhibition features dozens of works by Israeli and international artists such as Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Doron Rabina, Yael Frank, Jennifer Bar Lev and more. Some of the art works were made especially for the event, and some, such as Zohar Gottesman’s Cheese Sculptures and Micha Laury’s Chocolate Soldiers are even edible. A gargantuan table with 49 bread loaves and salt -- an installation by Romanian artist Mircea Cantor -- will greet visitors at the entry to the gallery.

During the exhibition, the gallery will host two culinary plays by Jeannine Worms, The Recipe and Coffee and Cake. Worms, one of the most original of France’s playwrights in the 20th century, wrote plays that use food to characterize gender, class and human interrelations, and this will be the first stage production of these plays in Israel in full.