Andrea Burgener

Andrea Burgener graduated with MAFA (cum laude) from Wits University. She lives in Johannesburg where her artistic practice remains closely connected to her decades long support of sustainable ethical food production.

Andrea Burgener’s practice extends from her research into the politics of food. Making takes myriad forms for the artist, chef and food writer. In media ranging from paint and pen to fast food boxes, coffee filters, birthday cake, stop motion animation and ‘whatnot’, Burgener weaves narratives around land, power and consumption. What emerges is a nexus of motifs and notations, delivered with distinctive wit and a cynical sensibility.

The European high-hat toque, symbolic of hierarchical, military-style kitchen brigades, recurs in works that consider links between agricultural processes and warfare. ‘The Phosphorus Trail’ is a series of photographs of assorted objects coated in phosphorescent paint that trace the devastation caused by the use of this chemical in historical conflict, through to its common use in fertiliser. Rats also appear regularly, as markers for the ways in which globalised systems direct our ethics, rendering these highly intelligent ‘vermin’ permissible as collateral damage.

Titles like, ‘Soil Erosion - the Musical’, ‘Battle Hymn of the Crop Sprayers’, ‘Shop today, get it tomorrow!’ introduce the disconnect in domestic consumption as the artist explores her own confused culpability. By pointing to the ‘invisibility’ of labour, food chains and chemicals like phosphorus and nitrogen that find their way into our food through fossil-fuel synthesised fertilisers, Burgener questions how visual fields made expressly for looking at, might engage the divide between urban consumers and industrial agriculture.