DINNER FOR THREE: ON THE REHEARSAL OF PERFECTION INSIDE
PROJECT & DIRECTION BY FEE
WORDS BY OBTUSE ARCHIVE
14 SEPTEMBER 2026 — BERLIN, GERMANY
Dinner for Three is Fee's photographic and video meditation on perfection as performance: a surreal reconstruction of mid-century domesticity that treats the dinner party as a stage direction. Every element is deployed with the precision of theatre: sculpted SFX makeup and doll-like styling recast the cast as exaggerated, contemporary heirs to the flawless 1960s housewife, while an almost imperceptible stiffness in their posture betrays the labour required to sustain the illusion. It is a project less interested in beauty itself than in beauty as choreography, the gap between how a moment is lived and how it is arranged to be seen. What we found most compelling, though, was everything that happens just outside that frame. So for this feature, we're pulling back the curtain: the styling rails weighed down with vintage fur, the ceramics thrown by hand for a table that would only ever be photographed once, the makeup chair where artifice was quite literally sculpted onto skin. If the finished work is about the discipline of appearing effortless, the behind-the-scenes is the effort itself: unglamorous, collaborative, and far more revealing than the performance it produced.
01 — The Perfect Dinner
The project takes its title literally, and that's the point: the dinner party as the purest available image of staged togetherness, three places set at a table that was never really meant to be eaten at. Fee, a Berlin-based director and visual artist, found her set already built at Konrad Tönz Bar in Berlin, a room that has been performing the same mid-century fantasy since long before the cameras arrived, and simply let the fiction continue one register further. The work unfolds across eight scenes, moving between the table itself and the corridors just outside it.
The work exists in two tenses at once. As photography, the perfect dinner holds: a single, uncanny instant, arranged and unmoving. As video, that same constructed reality is set into motion. Gestures unfold, interactions repeat, and the carefully orchestrated scene becomes a performance expressed through movement, revealing what exists beyond the still image.
Dinner for Three, Scene 3
Dinner for Three, Scene 2
02 — Behind the Table
Before the lights come up, the room is just a room: a single lamp, a bottle, three glass-slipper coupes arranged on a café table at Konrad Tönz Bar in Berlin, waiting for a scene that hasn't started yet. It's the same table that will anchor the film once the cast sits down, but for now it's only furniture rehearsing its future as a set piece.
Much of that waiting is Director of Photography Yaroslav Ilyin's doing. Rather than building the mood from scratch, he worked with what the room already gave him: the amber wash of a single practical lamp, the low light bouncing off the bar's own fittings, shadows left mostly alone. It's a quieter approach than the finished stills suggest, one that trusts the space to do the atmospheric work before a single face enters frame.
Dinner for Three, table setting. Backstage, Konrad Tönz Bar, Berlin.
Down the corridor, a quieter kind of labour is underway. A wardrobe rail sags under vintage fur, feathers and knits pulled from stylist Marusja Gerassimoff's Berlin store (@annonce.shop) material for a silhouette that hasn't decided yet whether it belongs to 1962 or 2026, and, once assembled, won't have to.
Dinner for Three, wardrobe rail. Backstage, Konrad Tönz Bar, Berlin. Styling by Marusja Gerassimoff (@annonce.shop).
03 — In Fee's Words
Fee's practice is driven by an interest in how femininity is socially constructed, performed and maintained within contemporary culture, explored through beauty, routine, and the rituals that shape everyday life. In Dinner for Three, she works entirely with staged and artificial scenes, from the location and lighting to the styling and gesture, to examine how femininity and perfection are rehearsed, maintained, and ultimately exhausted.
Dinner for Three, behind the scenes. Backstage, Konrad Tönz Bar, Berlin.
"Everything is pretty, but also slightly uncomfortable."
— Fee, director
Dinner for Three, moments from backstage. Konrad Tönz Bar, Berlin.
04 — Making the Illusion
The surreal edge running through the project is mostly built by hand, and mostly out of frame. SFX artist Juliette Ruetz sculpted the prosthetic lips that push each face just past believable, a small deformation that reads, on second glance, as pure 2026 beauty trend wearing a 1960s mask. Hair artist Julian Hutcheson built every wig himself; makeup artist Karla Romero supplied the colour underneath the artifice, the last layer between the character and the woman wearing her.
Dinner for Three, hair and makeup. Backstage, Konrad Tönz Bar, Berlin.
The table itself is dressed in ceramics: vases, plates, wine glasses, thrown by hand specifically for the shoot by Berlin ceramicist Sofiia Sytnyk. They're the one honest object in the room, made for this table and no other, and it's their presence, more than anything staged around them, that quietly breaks the 1960s illusion and pulls the scene back into the present.
Dinner for Three, ceramics by Sofiia Sytnyk.
Dinner for Three, ceramics by Sofiia Sytnyk.
05 — The Film
Dinner for Three exists as a video work as much as a photographic one. The discomfort under the stillness only really lands in motion. Löbel is currently looking for a venue to exhibit the piece; for now, here's a first look at how she imagines it staged, plus a scene that's never been shown before.
Dinner for Three, exhibition preview. A first look at how Fee imagines the work staged.
Dinner for Three, Scene 7. Previously unseen.
06 — Credits
Director — Fee (@feetasticcc)
DOP — Yaroslav Ilyin (@iliynf)
Photo Editor — Donnya Torkaman (@don.nya)
Styling — Marusja Gerassimoff (@marusjamvp)
Makeup — Karla Romero (@karlaromeromakeup)
SFX Makeup — Juliette Ruetz (@julietteruetz)
Hair — Julian Hutcheson (@julianhutcheson)
Set Design & Ceramics — Sofiia Sytnyk (@st.soofiia)
Editing — Agrippina Meshcherykova (@agrippina_m)
Sound Design — Aaron Holzenleiter (@sca)
VFX — Planemo Film (@planemo_film)
Talents — @lisabldwn, @sharmeenanjum, @nmnrden
