The MessHall

Taha Saraei's MFA Defense
Wednesday, October 30, 2026 | 2:30 PM
Room 2205 – SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

How can performance become an analogy of a thing instead of representing it? During my MFA, Kaja Silverman’s The Miracle of Analogy gave me a new vocabulary to rethink how a photograph affects its viewer, if it does. She distinguishes analogy from sameness and substitution, containing both similarity and difference. Similarity is what holds two things together, and difference is what keeps them from collapsing into one. In The MessHall, I explored performance as an analogy of its actual space in the SCA building, the happenings during its duration, and the historical context shaping its process.

Memories of mandatory military service, where my roles as cook and soldier affected one another, led me to choose cooking to draw an analogy from its reality. A meal gives labor an aim, while how that labor has been carried out shapes the meal. Also, it brings one’s labor into relation with others’ anticipation.