BAR niro
BAR niro was a participatory installation at Bungee Space, New York in August, 2024.
In her participatory installation BAR niro, artist Rujuta Rao invites the audience to experience artworks from a menu across a bar counter.​ The menu includes the Goan distilled beverage cashew feni, an edible pairing, artworks, artist books, and printed matter made by Rao during her 2024 Center for Book Arts Residency in New York City. The works included in the menus encapsulate Rao’s learning of cashew feni while drawing parallels between its history and her family’s migration to Goa. They were made alongside studying the production of cashew feni, its role within Goa’s social fabric, its use in ceremonies, rituals, and for medicinal purposes and its history which begins with the cashew plant which was brought by Portuguese colonialists from Brazil to India. In light of feni's rising popularity, Rao is curious about what it means to share a personal experience of the beverage on an intimate scale. This format of exhibition is an extension of Rao’s practice of creating and sharing tactile artworks for individual viewers, her past experience as a bartender and her training as a Japanese sake advisor.
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A successive iteration, BAR soro, was presented at Parent Company gallery in September 2024, reflecting Rao’s approach to artmaking as a continually evolving tool for learning. In the feni-making process, niro—the Konkani word for juice extracted from the cashew apple—is distilled into soro. Similarly, the artworks shared in the first iteration are transformed through the learning process into those presented in the second.
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An accompanying essay titled Barring Tenderness was contributed by Laurel V. McLaughlin