2018
Haifa, Israel
Manjam- After The Last Supper
Manjam is a 2018 performance work by Maiada Aboud, developed in Haifa in the context of Manjam Lab.
The work transforms the familiar act of dining into a charged performative encounter, where the audience is not only watching
a performance but participating in a ritual of consumption. Structured around a three-course meal and live performance,
Manjam places the table at the centre of the experience: a site of hospitality, communion, appetite vs discomfort and confrontation..
The work draws on the visual and symbolic language of Christian ritual, especially the image of the Last Supper.
The dining table becomes becomes an altar, a stage and a scene of sacrifice. The performers’ bodies activate the space between
religious iconography and lived bodily experience. References to communion, blood, offering and collective gathering are reimagined
through performance, shifting the Last Supper from a sacred image into an embodied, unstable and contemporary situation.
A central image in the work is the dripping of blood onto the performer’s head. This gesture evokes sacrifice, martyrdom,
baptism, punishment and bodily exposure. It unsettles the boundary between spiritual symbolism and physical vulnerability. Blood,
usually hidden from the dining table, enters the scene directly and interrupts the comfort of eating. The audience is placed in a difficult position:
they are invited to consume food while witnessing a body marked by pain, ritual and endurance.
By combining a three-course meal with live performance, tension is created between pleasure and unease.
Eating is usually associated with nourishment, sociability and care, but here it becomes complicated by the presence of suffering,
religious symbolism and bodily intensity. The meal continues, but the conditions of eating are disturbed.
The audience must ask whether it is still possible to enjoy food while another body is being exposed,
marked or symbolically sacrificed in front of them.
The discomfort is central to the work. The performance does not allow the audience to remain passive or innocent.
The act of dining becomes ethically loaded: every bite is taken in relation to the performer’s body,
to blood, to ritual memory and to the histories embedded in Christian symbols. The work uses this uncomfortable closeness
to question how spectators consume images of pain, how communities gather around sacrifice, and how religious
and cultural symbols continue to shape the body.
Through its fusion of dinner, ritual and performance, Manjam turns the table into a space of confrontation.
It invites the blind folded audience to experience beauty, appetite and unease at the same time. The work asks what it means
to eat together when the meal is haunted by sacrifice, and what happens when the comfort of hospitality is interrupted by
the visible presence of blood, suffering and embodied memory.
