The food was especially beside the point at Alcova. People become like children, almost.” Guests start talking to one another, asking, What is that? Can I eat it? “I care a lot about food,” Gohar said. lurking, and, when you bring my work into those kinds of spaces, it acts like an instant icebreaker. But the spaces where I work are often not that.” At galleries or fashion shows, “you’re just kind of . . .
“You walk in there, you’re greeted, people are nice to you. “Restaurants are, by design, supposed to make you feel comfortable,” she told me. But Gohar welcomes these moments of uncertainty. Sometimes doing so requires the type of intervention a shy partygoer might hesitate to undertake-whacking a chocolate bust with a mallet, say. Many of her pieces-a swan made of artichoke leaves, a rope of braided mozzarella the length of a banquet table, a single rose inside a translucent fish molded of champagne gelatine-are arresting enough that it is not immediately apparent how or whether to go about eating them. At a Nike dinner in New York in early 2020, Drake introduced Gohar by calling her the “Björk” of food. She has arranged grids of jewel-like radishes for Prada and served boiled eggs and sea beans for Hermès. In recent years, Gohar’s jolie-laide assemblages have become fixtures of fashion parties, gallery openings, and international events like the Salone, where they provide both snack and spectacle. “But it’s not the point.” Photograph by Hugo Yu for The New Yorker It entered through the department store’s second-floor windows, with the help of a crane, and came to rest on a pork-pink marble plinth, surrounded by matching flowers-a monument of cold-cut grandeur. What Gohar delivered (along with a hula-hoop-wide raspberry tart and larger-than-life butter sculptures of a hand, a mouth, and an ear) was a mortadella the size of a telephone pole. In 2019, when the French department store Galeries Lafayette hoped to lure luxury shoppers to its new location on the Champs-Élysées, the company turned to Gohar to cater an opening-night party. Like many of the designers and decorators attending the fair, Gohar has made a career out of elevating something functional-in her case, food-to rarefied aesthetic heights. Gohar was in the midst of creating an installation at the independent design show Alcova, an offshoot of the Salone del Mobile, Milan’s annual furniture fair.
Most would be embalmed in shellac and arrayed in precise and inscrutable tableaux, although it was too soon to say exactly how. Only a small number of these confections would be eaten. The bags-from Gucci, from the venerable pasticceria Marchesi 1824, from the supermarket chain Penny-held food, mostly: floral pastilles, pistachio drops, sugared squares of fruit jelly, pastries shaped like maraschino-tipped breasts. On a hot June afternoon in Milan, Laila Gohar emerged from a taxi at the Ospedale Militare di Baggio carrying many bags. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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