Pop Food II converts the hospital tray into a stage where nourishment and image converge. Each meal—soup, fruit, bread, chicken, omelette, or beans—is photographed with its plastic lids, paper slips, and utensils intact. The repetition is crucial: the tray, identical in every shot, imposes a format that both regulates and reveals the banality of institutional life. Within this strict frame, variation appears only through colour and arrangement: an orange against a blue lid, a pear beside a folded pink paper, a soup casting a pale reflection. The work exploits this tension between uniformity and difference. On one level, it documents the aesthetic poverty of institutional food, where nutrition is reduced to calories, containers, and codes. On another, it reframes these elements as composition: a cube of melon becomes a colour block, the sealed cutlery a silver diagonal, the plastic cover a field of monochrome. The tray thus performs as both ration and canvas, staging the paradox of survival in minimalist terms. The project also gestures to a politics of care. Hospital food is not cuisine but protocol: designed to sustain bodies efficiently, it embodies a form of biopolitics where health is standardised through diet. By isolating and repeating these meals, Pop Food II makes visible the aesthetics of that regime, at once impersonal and intimate. The meals carry traces of fragility—patient labels, dietary instructions—but are presented as if part of a serial artwork. The title anchors the work in a tradition of pop aesthetics, recalling how Warhol and others elevated the banal to the status of art. Yet the humour is tinged with vulnerability: here the pop is not exuberant packaging but modest survival, the ordinary labour of keeping a body alive. What might otherwise pass unnoticed in the routine of hospital care is reframed as a visual sequence that insists on attention. In the end, Pop Food II is less about food than about framing. It demonstrates how repetition, context and presentation can transform nourishment into image, routine into archive. Each tray is at once evidence of institutional order and a quiet portrait of dependency, staging an encounter where health, art, and survival briefly align.
