Architectural Digest India: Shilpa Gupta and the art of infiltration

“Can there exist something only to trigger an emotion?”

By Anindita Ghose

Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976)

The works are on view at ‘Today Will End’, which opened on 21 May and is on till 12 September 2021 at M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp.

Movement

Shilpa Gupta lives and works in Mumbai, India, where she studied sculpture at the Sir J.J. School of Fine Arts (1992-1997). Her work has been shown in leading institutions such as Tate Modern, MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, the Mori Art Museum, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and, closer home, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Devi Art Foundation.

Among the first batch of Indian contemporary artists to adopt New Media as their métier, Gupta’s work is multifaceted and often interactive; utilizes sculpture, installation, text and photography; and displays a mastery of audio and visual technologies.

She has often spoken about the impact of the 1992 communal riots in Mumbai being a formative experience, which is evident in her preoccupation with ideas of movement, borders, surveillance, mass psychology and the Other. While her works exhibit tremendous aesthetic diversity, she firmed up her artistic idiom early, at the age of 24 with Aar Paar, a public art exchange between India and Pakistan that she facilitated with Pakistani artist Huma Mulji.

Even as the pandemic caused four of her international solos to be postponed, Gupta’s first mid-career survey exhibition Today Will End is ongoing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp. Curated by Nav Haq, the exhibition brings together several key works for the first time in her 20-year practice.

Site-specific neon. 236 x 37.5 in | 600 x 95 cm. 2012. Courtesy the artist and …Einzweidrei

Clémentine Bossard

Today Will End

When I last met Shilpa Gupta, she was writing across the night sky. Gupta was finessing the installation of one of her trademark neon-light works We Change Each Other on Mumbai’s Carter Road promenade. Its location by the Arabian Sea, blinking against the unfettered sky, illustrated the telegraphic nature of Gupta’s work. They are portals that lead to other worlds of meaning

Nav Haq, the curator of Gupta’s first mid-career survey exhibition, ongoing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, tends to agree. Take, for instance, Gupta’s soap bricks embossed with the word ‘Threat’ that viewers are encouraged to carry away from the exhibition site. It signifies different things to viewers at different sociopolitical touch- points at every location it is exhibited. One cannot see Gupta’s latest work, a 35-minute flapboard with text flashing at intervals, at the Chemnitz Hauptbahnhof in Germany, without the Coronavirus infecting our gaze: We Are Closer Than You Ever Imagined looks at the idea of contagion, infiltration and seepage, which is impossible to contain in the age of hypermedia. “It’s very often the case that events in the world become the backdrop to the exhibitions you organize, and give them more meaning,” adds Haq.

Gupta’s work has evolved aesthetically in her 20-year practice but her thematic concerns have been long-term. Security— personal, cultural, geopolitical—has been a recurring theme. Gupta has teased out what Joyce Carol Oates called the ‘aesthetics of fear’ by placing suitcases in public spaces with ‘There Is No Explosive In This’ printed across; she did this on London’s Pont Street in 2007, at a time when Londoners were still reeling from the train blasts. She carried one such suitcase up and down central London herself to study reactions. The speculative nature of her practice has always blurred the boundary between artist, viewer and the work to create a fluid interaction in which all contributors share responsibility. As Sunil Khilnani writes in Drawing in the Dark, a 2017 monograph on Gupta, “she smuggles art into the world and the world into art.” This infiltration is often unnerving, perhaps most starkly in her performance work Blame (2002), where she peddled small bottles of fake blood in Mumbai local trains with a label that read: “Blaming you makes me feel so good, so I blame you for what you cannot control, your religion, your nationality...” Almost 20 years removed from its immediate context of the Godhra riots and 9/11, it remains disconcertingly relevant.

Even as the essence of Gupta’s works mutate across geographies and psychological landscapes, her work itself is preoccupied by the idea of movement and what restricts the movement of people and ideas—borders, surveillance, censorship. Her exploration of the illegal trade between Bangladesh and India led to a solo project as part of My East is Your West, organized by the Gujral Foundation in Venice in 2015. In 100 Hand-drawn Maps of India (2007–2008), Gupta asked participants to sketch outlines of the country from memory and displayed the incongruous results. In a wall drawing from 2005–06, the artist made a flag with yellow police tape reading: “There is no border here”. At the Havana Biennial that year, it made people stand in front of the work and weep.

For someone who stresses on the “impossibility of containing movement”, it is with some irony that she tells me that she feels stuck at the moment. She is unable to visit her show in Antwerp. “Human beings can catapult over whatever situation. You cannot restrict movement,” she still insists. One of Gupta’s earliest projects, while still an art student, was an untitled mail art project in which she anonymously posted 300 ink drawings to people selected at random from the mailing list of a local public art gallery. This was a formative work, setting out a number of recurring interests that became important to her practice: incorporating process into the work, the notion of actively reaching out, and the desire to talk directly to the public.

Gupta’s works bore deep but there is a surface-level accessibility to them as well. “In terms of people receiving the work, it’s like keeping the door slightly ajar to start a possible conversation. Can there exist something only to trigger an emotion or a thought?” she asks. Her pundit-meets-punk aesthetic has spanned Advaita philosophy to guerilla performances where not just soap bars but white balloons with messages scrawled across may be handed to exhibition visitors and passersby who carry it into other worlds with them. For even where people cannot go, Gupta knows that art can infiltrate.

Interactive installation. Bathing soaps. 28.5 x 90 x 42 in. 2008-09 

Didier Bamoso

Interactive installation. Bathing soaps. 28.5 x 90 x 42 in. 2008-09 

Didier Bamoso

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