"Some Suns Fell Off" at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery reframes nationalism through poetic fragments and disrupted forms that lay bare the inherent arbitrariness of our ideological constructions. Nationalism, religious fundamentalism, social identity and political polarization are themes Gupta has frequently addressed in her work. They manifest here with renewed resonance as the exhibition opened in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. election.

The Shilpa Gupta's minimalist interventions at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, grapple with absence, erasure and exile. In his treatise on literature’s relationship to loss and the limits of representation, The Writing of the Disaster (1980), Maurice Blanchot suggests that ‘[w]hoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country – his own – where he is not a prophet’. For the French theorist, writing is inextricably linked to absence, erasure and exile, shaped by the spectre of what cannot be said. This negative space left behind by writing – and, indeed, by art – finds poignant expression in Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s solo presentation at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, ‘Some suns fell off’. Through a series of minimalist interventions, Gupta articulates the keenly felt absences of voices exiled from public life, while probing incorporeal structures that shape systems of control, such as the nation-state.