The Burden Of Memory

Subodh Gupta’s first retrospective in Paris is a reminder of the artist’s preoccupation with the accoutrements of middle-class life. How a remembered Bihar is at the heart of his art.

- Chinki Sinha

THE LOCUS OF RESISTANCE IS THE GLEAMING skull in the centre. He christened it Very Hungry God in 2006 when it was first unveiled. Pots and pans were welded together to form the forbidding sculpture, its hollows and frozen grin (grimace?) representational of a god that devours, an insidious god. The steel defies corrosion and so is, in its way, an almost immortal work of art. The artist, meanwhile, is all too aware of his mortality. No stranger to hunger, to upturned and empty pots and pans. All too aware of the ironies and relentless inevitability of this moment, his epic work celebrated with a retrospective in a temple of European high culture. And his presence at a gilded dinner he plans himself, feeding rich and important Parisians—Brigitte Macron, wife of the French president, is here—with Bihari staples, the hyperlocal made universal.