Evening Standards : Shilpa Gupta at Barbican Curve review: a growing, devastating cacophony of oppression
The Indian artist’s new installation expresses solidarity with the common humanity of those oppressed throughout the world for their ideas
Shilpa Gupta’s spellbinding installation at the Barbican Curve, For, in Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, is at the climax of this show – a gloomy room, lit by hanging lamps, in which 100 black microphones hang from the ceiling. They’re also speakers, and from them we hear voices chanting, whispering, singing and reading. The words they deliver, in different languages, are fragments of verse written by poets incarcerated for their beliefs, their identity or their work, from the 8th century to today.
The excerpts also appear on single pages, pierced by metal spikes which sit beneath the microphones. They hang at different heights – perhaps the level of the mouths of different people, tall and short, from all over the world, whose imprisonment is reflected in the sounds we hear. Together, the microphone, page and spike are like crude, brutalised bodies carrying the poetry, which might begin from one speaker and ripple through the Curve space, repeated or embellished by other voices.
We can walk between them and read the words, from Heberto Padilla’s lament—“Cuban poets no longer dream/not even in the night, not even in the night/They close the door to write on their own/when the wood creaks suddenly” — to the despair of Liu Xiaobo — “I’m handcuffed/And thrown into a prison van heading nowhere/Besides a lie/I own nothing.”
The echoing of the words by this chorus emphasises solidarity in the common humanity of the people represented here, but also how widespread the abuses of human rights have been in states across the world — and still are, not least in Gupta’s Indian homeland, where the Modi government has arrested writers and academics.
The precarious situation faced by poets past and present is illustrated in a tiny, fragile but stirring sculpture in the space before the main installation: a small stack of broken pencil leads, evoking the resilience of those who wrote from prison but the fragility of the tools that allowed them to do so.
Many of the small sculptures here are tucked into easily missable alcoves. One features a cast of the inside of a mouth in gunmetal, accompanied by an anonymous text detailing an experience where men stepped out of a car and “pushed into my mouth, a liquid. The mouth froze.” These and other texts, accompanied by delicate drawings housed in small, barred frames, detail grim state-sponsored violence. In a new work which greets you as the show opens, the cause of so much oppression gradually unravels across two angled motion flapboards, the kind you usually see in railway stations. They produce fragments of text, hints of conversation, with often misspelled, mangled words, like “truth” and “lies”. “Prove my love via hate,” they spell out at one point, before they eventually manically flip over for several seconds.
After this revolving blur of letters and numbers it settles, reading: “I look at things with eyes different from yours.” An innocent statement, perhaps. But here, amid testimony of so much ideology-caused suffering, it’s devastating.
Article published in www.standard.co.uk