Career Launcher Exhibition | OCADU 2026

"The Table Dreams Far from Home is a series of staged photographs exploring immigrant culture, diaspora, and mixed cultural households through food and domestic objects. The work considers identity as shaped by lived experience and inherited culture, revealing the ways diasporic individu­als experience partial belonging and cultural hybridity. Each image presents a table setting combining Indonesian textiles, Dutch and Indonesian foods, and Western and East Asian tableware, creating a space where fragments of culture meet and interact. The table becomes both a literal and symbolic place for memory, identity, and exchange.

Through a diasporic lens, the series reflects the perspective of what I call cultural orphans. These are individuals who encounter their ancestral culture through distance, memory, and fragments of tradition. Customs, language, and practices may feel familiar yet distant, mediated through stories, objects, and experiences filtered by other cultural frameworks. My own connection to Indonesian culture exists largely through food and domestic objects inherited from my family, representing only a portion of a larger cultural landscape. These fragments, passed down through stories and inter­generational memory, reveal the gaps created by geographic and generational separation.

The work is informed by my experience navigating life between cultures, including immigrating to Canada from the Netherlands and my simultaneous second-generation Indonesian experience. Food becomes a bridge to culture, and the table becomes a place where memory, diaspora, and identity are gathered and shared. In many images, hands belonging to my family appear serving and sharing food, offering warmth and hospitality while inviting viewers into the scene. The overhead perspective emphasizes the relationships between objects, gestures, and narratives, guiding the eye to consider both visual composition and cultural meaning.

The Table Dreams Far from Home invites viewers into this space of exchange. Through objects, food, and shared gestures, the series celebrates the complexity of cultural hybridity. It offers a med­itation on inheritance, adaptation, and belonging, revealing how identities are assembled from frag­ments of memory, tradition, and experience across generations and geographies."

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