Double Shifts emerges from the daily reality of many migrant artists in Europe, who live between two kitchens. At home, cooking becomes a practice of care, orientation, and connection, a way of negotiating displacement and sustaining mental and physical well-being. In restaurants and service spaces, these same artists perform repetitive and underpaid labour that finances the fragile possibility of artistic production. Art-making and food-making merge into intertwined forms of labour, both essential to creative life. Yet the "backstage" kitchen remains largely invisible within the cultural sector.
By offering each participating artist a paid restaurant shift, the exhibition creates a brief reflexive moment within the cycle of working and making, a space to respond to the shared struggles of their situation as artists. Amid shrinking public funding, limited institutional support, and restrictive visa regimes for non-EU art graduates, Double Shifts foregrounds food and service labour not as something "behind" art, but as an essential material condition shaping contemporary artistic practice, as a site where questions of visibility, endurance, health, identity, and survival are negotiated on a daily basis.
The participating artists engage with themes ranging from post-academy crisis and housing instability to bodily fatigue, racialised and gendered service work, as well as the entanglement of food authenticity, hygiene regimes, and coloniality embedded in taste and smell. Beyond exhaustion and precarity, the exhibition also attends to the other face of this condition: moments of suspension from career pressure, meditative rhythms within repetition, and multiple forms of creativity grounded in ordinary life. Here, the kitchen in itself becomes a space of reflection, imagination, and collective survival.