Cuisine à tous les étages


Installation, Performance,
Group Exhibition
Staircase of the Austrian Cultural
Forum, New York, USA, 2012

As part of the exhibition
Our House, 2012

Curated by
Amanda McDonald Crowley 

Commissioned work

On the ten-year anniversary of the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York in 2012, Rainer Prohaska was invited to design a site-specific installation. The remarkably narrow house with a width of 7.6 meters and astounding 28 floors designed by the Austrian architect Raimund Abraham served as a welcoming space for experimentation to rethink Prohaska’s performance cuisine in vertical terms. The staircase was transformed into a system of working stations that were interconnected by tubes like a vertical assembly line.

This modularly fragmented kitchen provided for an interactive installation on opening night. Using detailed recipe instructions, the audience of the Austrian Cultural Forum were challenged to prepare a simple meal together. The ingredients used found their way through the tubes to the next station and, finally, into the pot.


Production by
Natascha Bojar