External | Did you know that Shilpa Gupta’s Smoke Series were taken in her Mumbai home?
Miraculously created clouds were formed just before moving-in day at her sharp black box residence in Bandra, Mumbai. Did somethIng catch fIre? Welcome home.
PUBLISHED: MAR 22, 2020
“This series brings a quiet presence of an outside in, questioning whether the policing of edges is even possible.”
In these images, a cloud of smoke hangs in various interior settings. The nebulous mass hovers along sharp edges and rigid definitions, appearing as a possible threat to what might be the interior of a home or an office. The constant evocation of threats to boundaries has often been the most potent way to enforce binaries of the inside and outside, and there—in, the insider and the outsider, whether in the form of an intruder in the microcosm of a home or an infiltrator in the wider context of national borders. This series brings a quiet presence of an outside in, questioning whether the policing of edges is even possible. In photographic terms, can there ever be a sharp focus on a nebulous entity? —Sabih Ahmed
“Smoke, which hovers at the edges of tight definitions, be it those of nation states or even ourselves, infiltrating Into domestic spaces, challengIng a sense of clarity In readings that limit themselves as binaries.”- Shilpa Gupta.