Damien Hirst: “it doesn’t matter who paint my paintings; I decide if they are good facts or not”
The last insanity of Damien Hirst
The exciting journey from conception to birth of a human being carved in 14 colossi of bronze. Is the shocking and controversial proposal that the british Damien Hirst has created to remain at the entrances to the hospital, Sidra, Doha, in the borders of Qatar, a country with a surface similar to that of Murcia is home to 2.7 million souls.
The collection, entitled The miraculous journey, offers a look at the successive stages of conception. The first of the sculptures captures the instant that a sperm fertilizes an egg; its transformation into a foetus and its progressive growth until the day of delivery, with the figure of a newborn child of 14 metres. The works also include the pregnancy of twins.
“I Guess that the cultural differences are a bit complicated. In England, it would not have been a problem to see a naked baby, not the embryo, the egg and the sperm,” admitted Hirst to the local press when the statue was first shown to the public, at the beginning of October 2013, in a lavish ceremony. “Culturally we can say that this is the first sculpture nude of the middle East,” he said then.
Weeks later, in the heat of the controversy generated in the social networks (supporters of religious conservatism rejected the representation of human beings in works of art), the qatari authorities covered up the sculptures on the grounds that the construction of the hospital could damage one of the pieces weighing 216 tons.
Since then, had remained in the vicinity of the clinic. His return to the stage coincides with the opening of the medical facilities, an investment of 8,000 million dollars in which has already been successfully performed surgery to separate conjoined twins.
Makes a half Sheika al Mayassa, sister of the current emir and head of the Authority of Qatar Museums authority, attempted to lessen the controversy, arguing that “there is a verse in the Koran about the miracle of birth”. “This is not against our culture or our religion”, explained a passionate that has become Qatar in the first purchaser of art on the planet. The collection of the royal family qatari contains pieces by Andy Warhol, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon or Damien Hirst.
Some theses that have reappeared, now that the installation of modern art prepares to welcome evergreen to the patients parading through the hospital, which also functions as a center dedicated to medical research in women and children. “We don’t expect that to be everyone’s liking. We don’t expect everyone to understand the collection. Are precisely there to be an element of discussion and thought”, slides Laila Ibrahim, an expert in the art of the Qatar foundation in a statement to Afp.
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