مانجا (Like Butter)

About this event

Join us for the upcoming programme of ‘The Kitchen As Studio’, with Ahlan Club by multidisciplinary artist Andrew Riad . What can a fruit hold? A season, a geography, a body, a kitchen, a childhood, a ritual. مانجا (Like Butter) takes the Egyptian mango as both subject and material, gathering around its many forms, textures, memories, and afterlives. For one evening, the kitchen studios open as a site of slow gathering and exchange: a table becomes a temporary commons, and a menu becomes a kind of edible score, moving the mango from ripe to steeped, sweet to sour, familiar to strange. Through a dinner of reinterpretations, we will eat our way through the fruit while offering the Egyptian mango as an entry point into our own archives. We’ll turn toward the personal and ephemeral: the fruits we remember, the rituals that surround them, the people who first offered them to us, the places they return us to. Through writing, drawing, fragments, associations, or simply sitting with a memory, we’ll make our own small records of the fruits we cherish. We invite you to bring a fruit that carries a memory, a season, or a place for you — and share it around the table with us. MENU Starters 1. Mango Ceviche Mains 1. Pickled Jalapeño & Mango Chutney grilled chicken with Roz Ahmar (Cumin Spiced Rice) 2. Skirt Steak with a Mango Chimichurri & Mango Infused Potato Purée Dessert 1. Mango & Orange Blossom Sorbet 2. Fresh Egyptian Mangoes Drinks 1. Water 2. Mango Iced Tea 3. Egyptian Mango Juice Venue: Alserkal Arts Foundation, WH51, Alserkal Avenue (pin) Time: 7PM - 9PM Date: Friday, 18 September2026 Biography Andrew Riad (b. 2000, Cairo) is a Coptic Nubian Egyptian multidisciplinary artist and poet exploring the intersection of poetry, research, performance, and gesture. He works with archives, text, moving and still images, culinary happenings, and soundscapes to undo a monolithic history and propose a [re]imagined and silenced history revealing ostracized narratives as original sources of truth and fact. His projects imbue an emancipatory framework and understanding of language, of archive, and in that, gestures towards an opportunity for play and imagination to build towards what he calls a futurenarrative. For him, language is the experience of sound and ritual; of symbol and gesture and as such, is a site for resurrection, imagination, and [re]integration. Riad started Ahlan Club to break bread together, to archive oral histories relating to our experience of gathering and rituals surrounding food. Ahlan Club co-creates with artists, collectives, writers, and farmers to build towards a collective archive rooted in our shared moments and our imagination. The Kitchen As Studio unfolds through three-month cycles of convivial interventions, inviting culinary practitioners to activate the Foundation's kitchen through participatory meals that nourish curiosity, foster critical discourse through food, and keep the table open for whoever comes next.