Kexin Hao , “ Revolution Is a Dinner Party ”, performance

Revolution Is a Dinner Party is a hand puppet performance by the artist Kexin Hao, combining singing and spoken word that reimagines Mao Zedong’s phrase, “Revolution is not a dinner party,” as an invitation to reflect on food, pests, and kinship. The play stages an afterlife dialogue between a sparrow and a rat. Drawing from Mao’s “Smash Sparrows” campaign and the French “Great Hanoi Rat Massacre,” the two debate class conflicts and historical injustice, revealing how human and vermin are entangled in political violence and colonial sanitation efforts.

Their conflict is interrupted by a silverfish deity—embodied by the performer’s own head and torso—who reveals that all three characters are parts of a single body: the sparrow as the world’s mouth, feeding on seeds; the rat as the gut, digesting the city's waste. She guides them not to heaven, but to a dinner party, reimagining revolution as an act of eating, where boundaries between self and others dissolve, and bodies extend into the world through food, waste, and decay. The performance unfolds within a puppet theatre set where guts, flowers, mouths, sewers, and sexual organs intertwine, evoking the porous, unruly nature of bodies and echoing the play’s theme of inter-species intimacy.

Performance is the opening event of the larger program WING WING, curated  by Anastasia Marukhina and Michał Grzegorzek.

The event is made possible thanks to the financial support from the Mondriaan Fund, the public cultural funding organization focusing on visual arts and cultural heritage.