Space Meal: An Earthly Dinner of Interplanetary Provocations
Space Meal
An earthly dinner of interplanetary provocations
Presented during Climate Week NYC
Menu and food by Tessa Liebman
In conversation with The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars by Mari Nagem
Date: Tuesday, September 22, 2026
Time: 6:00–9:00 pm
Tickets: $60–$100 sliding scale; free for CUE members (see here and below)
Join us in the gallery for Space Meal, a roving multi-course dinner by artist and chef Tessa Liebman during Climate Week NYC. The program is presented in conversation with the work of artist Mari Nagem to mark the closing of her solo exhibition at CUE, The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars.
Space Meal does not propose a menu for outer space. Instead, it begins here on Earth, where changing environments, new technologies, and inherited knowledge continually shape and reshape what we consume. Nagem’s exhibition moves between a hyper-heated Earth and speculative environments on the Moon and Mars, considering transformations to bodies, materials, and living systems as they encounter new conditions. Space Meal brings these provocations to the table; food is equally adaptive: it can be preserved and dried, carried from one context to another, altered by heat, shaped by available resources, and informed by the tastes and habits we acquire along the way.
Developed through conceptual and textural responses to works in the exhibition, the menu draws from homegrown culinary traditions alongside ingredients and techniques that evoke changing landscapes, imagined ecosystems, geological time, and new and longstanding technologies. Each dish will be situated in direct relationship to the spatial and conceptual environment of the exhibition, temporarily transforming the gallery and offering a sensory and embodied exploration of taste, texture, and place. Throughout the evening, questions of preservation, migration, and survival ground our perceptions of ecological change.
The conditions of life on Earth are already shifting. What foods and practices might endure? And even as we imagine new futures, both here and elsewhere, what familiar tastes, desires, and contradictions will we insist on bringing with us?
Space Meal is a ticketed dinner that includes seven vegetarian food offerings and light drinks. Tickets are available at sliding scale pricing from $60–$100 per person. The true cost of the dinner is approximately $100 per guest. All proceeds support expenses and labor that make the event possible. Members of CUE enter free (sign up here and indicate your RSVP upon registering).
Capacity is limited, and tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please note that this is not a seated dinner. Guests will move through the gallery over the course of the evening, with food presented in relation to works in the exhibition.
Tessa Liebman is an artist and chef who has been cooking in her hometown of New York City for over twenty years. Through her work as a chef and caterer, she began to recognize the power of the senses to guide perception, elicit memory and emotion, and introduce new information, channeling these observations into a multidisciplinary art practice. She works extensively with the olfactory, and has collaborated with artists and perfumers as a “sensory translator,” interpreting their materials and stories through forms she knows well: food and drink.
Liebman develops conceptual, multisensory, and interactive installations, gatherings, and experiences. Her practice considers how small and subtle shifts in where we place our attention might change our relationships to our bodies and surroundings. She engages participants in sometimes “sneaky” ways, using sensory encounters to draw attention to their own reactions, associations, and cultural biases. Drawing on longstanding interests in sociology, psychology, and art history, her work explores the senses as tools for presence, curiosity, and connection, particularly within our current attention economy.
Liebman’s many projects include workshops on food, the senses, and storytelling; Methods & Madness, a ticketed dinner series developed through collaborations with artists, designers, perfumers, baristas, foragers, printmakers, and other creative practitioners, with menus informed by their processes (their “methods”) and inspirations (their “madness”); and Scents of Plates, a project that uses food and fragrance to translate stories, ideas, and memories from one sense to another. Her ongoing Multisensory Experience Kits offer playful tools for engaging the senses while thinking about our personal and collective past, present, and future. Led by intuition and curiosity, Liebman often follows questions and ideas, allowing one project or encounter to generate the next. Across these forms, she is interested in what can happen when we redirect our attention toward our own senses, one another, and the world immediately around us, and in the possibilities for connection and agency that might follow.
Mari Nagem (b. Belo Horizonte, Brazil) is a multidisciplinary artist conceptually driven by the relationship between nature and technology. She has been awarded numerous international fellowships, commissions, and residencies, including: S+T+Arts Buen-TEK Residency (Rome, IT and Fortaleza, BR, 2026); a public commission for COP30 by the Tomie Ohtake Institute for the Emílio Goeldi Zoobotanical Park and Museum (Belém, BR, 2025); commissions for Mostra 3M (São Paulo, BR, 2024) and SFER IK Museion (Tulum, MX, 2024); the Celia and Wally Gilbert Fellowship at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (US, 2024); the New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Program (US, 2024); and the Ox-Bow Program Fellowship (US, 2022). She has been nominated for and received awards from Ars Electronica (S+T+Arts, 2026 and CIFO, 2024), the Pipa Prize (2024), and the Marcantonio Vilaça Prize (2021).
Nagem has participated in Latin American biennials, including Bienal Sur at the Macro Museum (Argentina) and the Digital Art Biennial (Brazil). She has had solo exhibitions at Cave Galeria (Fortaleza, 2026), Galeria Lume (São Paulo, 2024), and Paço das Artes (São Paulo, 2022), among others. Her work has been shown at Tomie Ohtake Institute, SESC, Oi Futuro, MAC Niteroí, the Museum of Image and Sound (BR); MESH Art Center, Selva, Berry Campbell Gallery, Flatiron Project Space, New York Live Arts (US); Savvy Contemporary (DE); Sea Foundation (NL); and festivals such as FILE, Die Digitale Düsseldorf, and Athens Digital Arts Festival.
Nagem’s projects and exhibitions have been featured in Art Dialogues Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Arte!Brasileiros, Estadão, Revista Select, and Brazil-based cultural television network Arte1, among others. She holds an MFA from the Haute École d'Art et Design de Genéve, and currently lives and works between New York and Brazil.
Related Exhibition
To learn more about The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars, a solo exhibition by Mari Nagem, see here.
