Mai Ling Soup Bath

Meditative Cooking Session in the frame of ‘Critiques of Power in the Arts’ / Sat 27.4.2024, 7pm

Meditative Cooking Session in the frame of ‘Critiques of Power in the Arts’ international gathering

Sharing food has always been a place of kinship, solace, care, and tenderness. Mai Ling Soup Bath invites you to a sensorial and contemplative sound bath, deep meditation, and massage. We will collectively stir up a warm concoction of familiar senses and a brew of edible memories while embodying our past, present, and future. At the end of the session, everyone is invited to share a warm meal together.

Mai Ling, founded in Vienna in 2019, is an anonymous artists’ collective and association committed to fostering dialogues on racism, sexism, homophobia, and prejudice, specifically targeting Asian FLINT* individuals (women, lesbian, inter, non-binary, and trans). The group challenges the Western heteropatriarchal gaze, confronting and dismantling ingrained racist stereotypes about ‘Asia’ through diverse artistic and discursive methods while seeking collective resistance and pleasure.

Mai Ling Soup Bath is the closing evening of the international gathering ‘Critiques of Power in the Arts’ taking place from 25-27th of April 2024 at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, initiated by the Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies in partnership with numerous organizations and individuals.

The performance will conclude with a common meal and a communal dance floor curated by Spice Mixers.

Spice Mixers is a collective that works with music, dance and art to create dancefloor spaces for queer and transgender BIPOC (Black, Indigenous & People of Colour) peoples in Vienna, where different cultural and social experiences of diaspora and migrant communities, particularly of/from the global South, in Vienna can be celebrated. They aim to showcase and promote queer and transgender BIPOC DJs, artists, dancers, entertainers and curators in Vienna, as well as to connect them to similar communities in neighboring cities and nightlife communities. Moreover, the collective works to engage our communities in discourses about class-conscious, diverse, anti-racist and accessibility awareness practices for dance floors and club cultures. Spice Mixers trains and works with BIPOC workers, organizers and curators to create safer dance floors and to center the needs and wishes of QTBIPOC dancers, which are often overlooked by the mainstream nightlife scene in Vienna due to the lack of diversity and marginalization of racialized peoples.

For Critiques of Power in the Arts, Spice Mixers is putting together a programme that allows us to transform the space together into a communal dance floor.