Gurrl Dinner
Gurrl Dinner · 2025 · Arts Evening· Summerhall, Edinburgh · Co-Curatorial Event.
A Cordial Invite
Gurrl Dinner was a curatorial event focused on fostering interpersonal connections through the familiar setting of a communal dinner. Collaboratively curated by myself and three colleagues, the project aimed to create an accessible and convivial environment that moved away from esoteric artistic conventions. Instead, we emphasised social engagement as both the form and content of the work: an opportunity for like-minded individuals to gather, share, and participate.
The title is from the viral social media trend started by TikTok user Olivia Maher, who coined the term “girl dinner” to describe meals assembled for comfort and enjoyment rather than for presentation or nutritional value. Similarly, our event invited university students to embrace an escape from obligation: a moment of leisure grounded in the simple pleasures of togetherness.
To anchor the experience, we incorporated embodied performances and participatory activities that physically situated the audience within the dinner setting. Throughout the evening, themes of refinement and humour intertwined, revealing playful contrasts between the formal and the casual. We explored the double meanings of terms such as “consumption” and ”digestion”, referring both to eating and to the intellectual or aesthetic absorption of art. These linguistic gestures functioned as light-hearted puns that dismantled any sense of seriousness or etiquette, encouraging openness and participation.
Ultimately, Gurrl Dinner aimed to cultivate an alternative artistic space, one that reimagined curatorial practice as an act of social gathering. Through play, conversation, and collective enjoyment, the project emphasised the potential of art to nourish both body and community.
Gurrl Dinner event took place in the Summer Hall Invitro gallery, and featured a central tablescape, as well as place setting for each attendee, along with a menu. This was intended to visually signify a deviance from typical dinner parties as the central décor was constructed of forages rocks and branches, and cutlery settings were replaced with flowers.
The Starter
Basing each artistic component around a conventional three course menu , as a collective we decided that the starter needed draw in participants, as well as being something easy to digest. As a result, we elicited the help of artist San Zhang to perform their piece Lobster in a China Shop.
Lobster in a China Shop, along side the visual parallels to fine dining with the performative dissection of a ceramic lobster, was an effective opener. Throughout the performance Zhang gradually incorporates the audience through call and response style chants, activating the viewers from passive observer, to active participant. The audience is immediately pulled into the atmosphere of Gurrl Dinner as they become collaborators in the piece, and become primed for the more action- based main course to follow.
The Main Course
As the central course, the following event had to supply the main substance of the experience. As a result, we decided that this needed to be something engaging that built on the starter. This took shape as an art-making workshop.
Paper was attached to walls, and chalks and oil pastels presented in ceramic. Participants were asked to respond to the starter with their drawings.
This was left to be relatively free for the participants to explore and find their own meaning within the experience. Here is also where participants had the opportunity to connect with each other and discuss their drawings.
The Desert
We decided that the final course had to be sweet, easy, and short. While the main was intended to satiate the ‘hunger’ of the attendees, the dessert needed to leave a taste in the mouth of the viewers to leave on.
The Dessert became a theoretical fruit salade, where all four of the organizers, including myself, read a poem including fruit. This included Seamus Heaney’s Blackberry Picking and Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market.
