While everyone else has spent so the last months talking about Damien Hirst’s $99,000,000 diamond encrusted skull, For the Love of God, visitors and residents of Venice are face-to-face with another skeletal momento mori that’s spookily floating in their Grand Canal, in front of the Palazzo Grassi exhibition hall.
Subodh Gupta’s 1000 kilo sculpture, Very Hungry God, is made out of aluminum pots and pans and it first apparated last fall in Paris in the Eglise Saint-Bernard church during Nuit Blanche. It’s currently on show in Venice as part of an exhibition of Francois Pinault’s collection.
In an interview on the Saatchi Gallery Blog, Gupta explains the forces that motivated him to craft this symbol of death out of objects that are used to sustain life:
The piece in Venice, “Very Hungry God”, was made in 2006 for the Nuit Blanche annual all-night festival in Paris. My work was conceived to be shown in a church in Barbes on the outskirts of Paris which is largely inhabited by an immigrant population.
I made the work in response to the stories I read in the news about how soup kitchens in Paris were serving food with pork so that Muslims would not eat it. It was a strange and twisted form of charity that did not continue for long but raised conflicting ideas of giving and the way we have become now.
Outside the church I served vegetarian daal soup as a form of “prasad” (in India when you go to a temple or a guduwara you are offered food with the blessing). I liked the mix of the Catholic church and my intervention using a symbol that many artists have used before – the skull – and its many connotations.
‘Very Hungry God’ is like a vanity, but also the idea of food and the utensils is very much part of my language dealing with ideas of the everyday and turning them into iconic symbols.
The piece is on exhibit until 11 November 2007.
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