Famous for its parmesan cheese and prosciutto, Parma is offering up nourishment for the mind over the next three months with the first edition of its Gastronomy in Modern Art Festival (GNAM).On the menu are a series of exhibitions in different venues across the city celebrating representations of food in modern and contemporary art through painting, photography, video installation and sculpture. Artistic director Andrea Gambetta described the festival as "a smorgasbord of tempting titbits and intellectual libations, with chef-artists and artist-chefs proposing a long menu of cultural delicacies and food for the mind".The main event is Foodscapes, at the ex-Cinema Trento until 6 January 2008, which explores concepts of food through the work of 40 international artists, from the sacred and formal to the animal and self-destructive.Among the works on show are Belgrade-born Marina Abramovic's "The Onion" (1996), a brutal and harrowing video in which the performance artist eats a large raw onion as if it were an apple, tears streaming down her face and nose running while in a voiceover she complains about the anxieties of her life.Bosnian artist Sejla Kameric, who lived through the war in Sarajevo, presents a more positive and poignant side to food in the photographic assemblage "The Basics" (2003), in which she appears with the bare essentials - two plastic containers of water in her hands and a round loaf of bread over her stomach - her face upturned to a light bulb, eyes closed and spiritually replete.The exhibition does not shy away from the end product of eating, as in Gilbert & George s "Eat & Drink" (1997), a mixed media painting that shows the two Brit"Feeding is private and collective at the same time, something strictly personal and simultaneously public," said Hungarian curator Lorand Hegy, who is also Director of the Saint-Etienne Modern Art Museum in France.