The Atlantican Fewd Happening is a multi-planet culinary performance and contemporary art project—a diabolical collaboration between artists April Bey and Akwasi Brenya-Mensa that transforms eating into world-building, storytelling, spectacle, and cultural exchange.
The project began with a culinary coincidence. While preparing for her first solo exhibition in London, Bey hoped to eat at Brenya-Mensa’s restaurant, Tatale, but could not guarantee that her schedule—or a reservation—would make it possible. As fate would have it, Brenya-Mensa was the chef hosting the opening dinner for her exhibition. They met through that meal, stayed connected virtually for months, and eventually reunited in Paris, where they ate their way through the city while imagining what they might create together.
Brenya-Mensa later lived with Bey for several weeks in Los Angeles. As they cooked, ate through the city, exchanged ideas, and collided creatively, their friendship developed into The Atlantican Fewd Happening. Its first iteration debuted during Frieze Los Angeles, followed by another in Miami, with future public-art and museum presentations planned throughout the United States and internationally.
Set within Bey’s speculative planet of Atlantica, each Happening opens a portal into Atlantica itself, where unique dishes seem to arrive directly from Bey and Brenya-Mensa’s shared imagination, as though transmitted from another world—an ongoing collaboration between Earth and these two alien chefs feeding their Atlantican inhabitants across dimensions. Through this opening, food, performance, installation, visual art, and communal dining merge into a single unfolding experience. The project treats the table as both stage and portal: a place where two distinct artistic practices meet, challenge one another, and generate experiences that could not exist without their creative friction. “Fewd” is spelled this way as a running joke between Bey and Brenya-Mensa, referencing Bey’s exaggerated British accent despite not being British, and her playful pronunciation of “food” as “fewd”—a Black British inflection she adopts around Akwasi, who is actually British.
