Food Art Fair begins with a bear. Not a real one, thankfully, but a glowing teddy-bear lamp created by Marianna Fontana and Giuseppe Burdo on the mezzanine level of London’s Ladbroke Hall. It’s the first sign that, here, visitors will encounter a different kind of London art fair.
Bringing together over 50 artists, designers, chefs, publishers, and makers, Food Art Fair is a two-day celebration of the many lives of food. This inaugural event took place on Saturday and Sunday, 5-6 September 2026. FAF invites visitors to explore the things we eat as image, object, ritual, memory, performance, and, most importantly, an excuse to come together.
First stop is the Print & Objects Market. Independent publishers, magazines, artists, and designers spill across the mezzanine floor, transforming the space into something between an art bookshop and your favourite flea market. A communal table brings together publications and objects from contributors hailing from outside of the Big Smoke, extending the conversation beyond the capital
From up here, you can already see the main studio below, and visitors get a taste (pun intended) of what’s to come. As you make your way down the staircase, you encounter photographs by Shifa Habeeb and fine-art prints by Stefania Zanetti.
Finally, at ground level, things get stranger. The main FAF studio opens with a study on food, ecology, and living systems, bringing together work by Sophie Gardner, Beverley Duckworth, Fatima Butt, Yasmine El Meleegy, and Caroline Bugby. Turn left and the familiar world of food begins to warp.
Here, more artists begin to play with the idea of food packaging and image-making. In 2026, what does it mean for food to be a product, or a status symbol? The artworks border on the uncanny, and the experience culminates in an edible work by Marianna Fontana and Angel Pan, who work with gelatines.
Further in, the mood becomes more intimate as we turn towards the body and our complicated relationship with what we put into it. Lancy Liu’s Food Fetish sits among other works charged with an electric sense of desire, tension, and obsession – perhaps, even, disgust.
In an era that many have termed the “Ozempidemic”, where the people both on our screens and in our homes are using GLP-1s to curb their appetites, this kind of zoomed-in look at how food relates to ideas of vanity, beauty, and the body feels strikingly pertinent. After viewing these works, the question on the tip on your tongue isn’t just, “How can food harm us”? But also, “How have we harmed food”?
In the final two rooms, we return home – metaphorically, that is – as we look at memory, domesticity, and belonging. Artists Yijia Wu, Song-i Saba & Hamish Pearch, Tianyi Li, Zara Kok, Louise Wan, Anna Choutova, and Elise van den Brand turn familiar food rituals and domestic objects slightly askew, suggesting how easily the things we associate with warmth and childhood can become distorted, taking on new meanings.
The party isn’t over once you leave the building, though. Outside Ladbrokes Hall, FAF continues. Through one door is the bar, where rotating edible pop-ups take over. Through the other is the garden, which has been converted into a late-summer playground of cakes, coffee, and edible experiments.
Visitors use onions to create colour, taste a corn-based fermented drink, and encounter a working fountain by Venice Tap Water. At Kyra Zhang and Yoma’s interactive table, collaboration is the price of admission: You have to work together to unlock it, then eat together.
Back inside, the workshop room keeps the fair in motion with talks, conversations, and participatory sessions. After 6pm on Saturday, the building changes again. Lujáne Vaqar Pagganwala opens the evening performance programme, projections by Julia Krivosheenko and Savva Mihaescu cast the studio in light and sound. Eventually, the night dissolves into film screenings.
Sunday brings another round of edible interventions: Agüita’s iced-coffee ritual, a huge painterly cake by Nuun Cakes and Leen Kay (Berryfield Studio), wines from Newcomer Wines, cakes from Hana no Hana, and Unusual Service’s prehistoric bitters, made with botanicals such as ginkgo, horsetail, and conifers – a cocktail inspired by the diets of dinosaurs, touching again on themes of history, time, and inheritance.
Finally, there is cake. It’s a commissioned one made to celebrate the first ever Food Art Fair, and this one you can actually eat – no interrogations of the body or memory, or nasty licks of revulsion, to be found. On the contrary, it’s a beautiful grape-dotted piece by Litri Zhenni Liao. After two days of playing with our food at FAF, it’s time to indulge. Cut yourself a slice and enjoy the sugar. It is a fitting finale and one that leaves us, quite literally, wanting more.
Follow FAF on Instagram @foodartfair
