There is a moment, if you have ever stood in front of Laila Gohar's work, when you forget entirely that what you are looking at was made to be eaten. But the story of food art is older, stranger, and far more serious than any single moment of cultural virality can contain. From Roman frescoes to Daniel Spoerri's Eat Art movement to butter sculpted into fragments recalling ancient Greek marble — food has always been a carrier of meaning. Labor and land, culture and class, memory and desire, compressed into something you hold in your hand. This is a cultural essay about what happens when the most basic human material asks the questions the cameras do not know how to frame.

From Coca-Cola TVC campaigns to curating for Tom Ford and La Mer from Bangkok, Mirelle Phachareeya Grünert moves between cultures with precision and philosophy. She doesn't aspire to be better than other creators — just better today than she was yesterday.

She buried a bed sheet in Los Angeles soil for eight months. She bleaches fabric until it finds its own pattern. She works in a former clothing factory in small-town Germany — and makes work about decay, the universe, and everything in between. Meike Legler in conversation