Andrea Burgener

Andrea Burgener graduated with an MAFA (cum laude) from Wits University and resides in Johannesburg. Her artistic practice is closely linked to her long-standing support of sustainable ethical food production. Burgener's work, which spans her roles as an artist, chef, and food writer, explores the politics of food using various media, including paint, pen, fast food boxes, coffee filters, and birthday cakes.

Her work is characterized by distinctive wit and a cynical sensibility, creating a nexus of motifs and notations. The European high-hat toque, symbolic of hierarchical, military-style kitchen brigades, frequently appears in her pieces that explore the links between agricultural processes and warfare. In her series 'The Phosphorus Trail,' she uses phosphorescent paint on objects to trace the devastation caused by this chemical in historical conflicts and its common use in fertilizer. Rats appear regularly in her work as markers of how globalized systems dictate ethics, rendering them permissible collateral damage.

Titles like 'Soil Erosion - the Musical' and 'Battle Hymn of the Crop Sprayers' delve into the disconnect in domestic consumption and Burgener's own conflicted culpability. By highlighting the 'invisibility' of labor, food chains, and chemicals like phosphorus and nitrogen in our food, Burgener questions how visual fields made for observation can engage the divide between urban consumers and industrial agriculture.