Nerman Museum exhibit showcases contemporary thought from India
By ALICE THORSON
A long wall of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art holds a gleaming array of stainless steel cookware — pots, buckets, trays, utensils — of the type used by most families in India. Artist Subodh Gupta’s rhythmic, repetitive arrangement of these everyday objects endows them with the solemnity of a shrine.
“I am particularly fond of kitchens,” Gupta says. “When I was a child, I considered it a place of worship, a kind of temple.”
Yet his eye-catching display, measuring a whopping 12 1/2 feet high by 35 feet long, would be at home in a high-end restaurant supply store, where the accouterments needed to produce global cuisines go in and out of fashion, ensuring consumer demand for new products.