We Must Not Lift Knife to Mouth @Serieuze Zaken

From 27 September to 18 October 2025 Galerie Serieuze Zaken presented ‘We must not lift knife to mouth’, an exhibition with new work by artists Marieke Gelissen and Miku Sato. This joint project sprung from their ongoing research into the language, rituals and political subtexts embedded in recipes and cookbooks.

In this exhibition Miku Sato turned to wartime cookbooks: those written for the military as well as for civilians living under rationing. In a new video installation she focused on chicken and eggs, once vital sources of protein. And presented them alongside drones, today’s new creatures of the sky.

Marieke Gelissen responded by turning the cookbook inside out. With wit and precision, she deconstructs poultry recipes into scores of verbs, sounds and gestures that challenge both function and form.

Together the works suggest that cookbooks were never just practical guides for housewives or cooks; beyond ingredients and instructions, they also carry moral codes, cultural narratives, and ideological undercurrents. ‘We must not lift knife to mouth’ uncovers these entanglements with works that move between performance, video, sculpture and text, with both capturing the hidden violence and the poetry that is captured in the recipes.

Images of the exhibition

About the artists

Marieke Gelissen explores how instruction, repetition and bodily engagement relate. Through performative research she transforms this into new texts, acts and images that result in poetic and sometimes absurd reinterpretations of the everyday. She graduated at Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2012 and has exhibited in the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Switzerland and Japan.

Miku Sato is a Japanese artist based in Amsterdam. She studied at the Graduate School of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts, and works with video, installation, and performance. Rooted in fieldwork at specific sites, she collaborates with local people to initiate projects and explore new ways of composing storytelling. In 2019, she was a fellow of the Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artists in the Netherlands. (visit website Miku Sato).