Financial Times : Shilpa Gupta at the Barbican — voices of persecuted poets.
The Indian artist summons haunting sounds to evoke her concern with freedom of speech
Shilpa Gupta’s ‘For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Hide’ (2017-18) sound installation as part of the ‘Sun at Night’ exhibition at the Barbican © Tim Whitby.
Rachel Spence JANUARY 13 2022.
“How bitter language has now become/and how narrow the door of the alphabet”. Those words, written by Adonis, the Syrian poet who was jailed in 1955 for his political activities, are especially poignant now. In 2020, according to campaigning organisation Freemuse, a record number of artists and writers found themselves in trouble with oppressive regimes. Those lines by Adonis are just one chord in an orchestra of voices that comprise “For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit”, a sound installation by Shilpa Gupta. Created by the Mumbai-based practitioner in 2017-18, “For, In Your Tongue” comprises 100 microphones-cum-speakers suspended above an equal number of metal spikes, each of which pierces a piece of paper bearing lines written by poets — 100 in all — who have been imprisoned, and sometimes executed, by their rulers. Recordings of the poems emerge from the speakers.
From the eighth-century poet Abu Nuwas through to Maung Saungkha, who was incarcerated in 2016 for six months in Myanmar after allegedly disrespecting the president, the gathering also includes the medieval Azerbaijani mystic Nesimi, the 20th-century Pakistani poet and communist Faiz Ahmad Faiz and radical Victorian reformer Samuel Bamford. My first encounter with the work came in 2019 at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala. Caged by the microphones, listening to the whispered kaleidoscope of tongues, including Arabic, Chinese and Hindi, it was as if the poets were flying through the bars of their cells to freedom. Now the installation is housed in the Curve gallery in London’s Barbican as part of Gupta’s exhibition Sun at Night. When Gupta saw the gallery, she said it reminded her “of a snaking back alley and perhaps even a spine of a curledup creature. The curator’s proposition to show the sound installation made sense — to infuse the Curve — with voices and sounds that hover, take risk and persist through the being of our societies.” The seeds of “For, In Your Tongue” were sown in earlier works, Gupta tells me from Mumbai, when we talk over Zoom. Her voice gentle, in person she reflects the sensitive, composed humanity that makes her work so compelling.
Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta © Shrutti Garg.
“One thing leads to another,” she observes, explaining that before “For, In Your Tongue” she had made “Someone Else” (2011), which gathered 100 books written under pseudonyms, and “Altered Inheritances” (2012-14), which illuminated historical figures obliged to change their names. An inspiration was the early 20th-century writer Premchand. Often focusing on poverty and social justice, Premchand originally wrote under the name Nawab Rai but changed it after a collection of short stories led to him being booked for sedition in 1909 when the British ruled India. “He was my mother’s favourite writer,” recalls Gupta. “But I discovered him late.” Gupta said she was “very startled” to hear of his run-in with authority. “You think, ‘How is this possible?’”
But by the time she made “For, In Your Tongue”, the risk to writers was horribly close to home. “I have friends who gave up their National Awards [India’s most prestigious arts prize] as a stand against the atmosphere of growing intolerance and curbing of independent voices,” she says as she relates her dismay at the way Narendra Modi’s government has cracked down on dissent in order to pursue its Hindu nationalist agenda. Among the imprisoned was Varavara Rao, an 81-year-old poet and activist, who has been released on medical bail. Rao is one of a number of writers approached to contribute to a new book edited by Gupta and Salil Tripathi, former chair of PEN International’s Writers in Prison committee. “I initially started researching authors and journalists. Then I read Salil’s very moving keynote speech at a poetry festival in Mumbai. It made me shift gears to research on poets,” says Gupta.
Described by Gupta as her “dream project”, the book will bring together 50 poems from “For, In Your Tongue” alongside her pencil drawings inspired by the poets’ plights. Others who will contribute include Dareen Tatour, the Palestinian poet jailed in Israel in 2018; women’s human rights activists Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita, detained in India in 2020; and Fateme Ekhtesari, an Iranian poet who was arrested in 2013 but has since escaped to exile.
Gupta’s ‘I Live Under Your Sky Too’ (2017) © Shilpa Gupta.
Describing herself without a hint of arrogance as “a very hard-working kid . . . among the school toppers”, Gupta studied at Mumbai’s legendary art college, the Sir JJ School of Art. With alumni including great modern painters such as VS Gaitonde and MF Hussain, the school was, says Gupta, “a time capsule that had kept itself safe” from the wilder shores of contemporary art. “You started with the Renaissance and stopped with Pop art.” Despite the lack of exposure to late-20thcentury practices such as installation, performance and multimedia, Gupta always experimented. In her first year she “presented enthusiastically” a work where she wrapped ghungroo — Indian dancing bells — in thread until they became a mysterious object on their own terms. “My professor told me that this was the kind of work you should do at home, not in school,” she remembers.
In part Gupta’s success is thanks to her gift for balancing an emotive political heartbeat with formal poise. However painful the narrative, she expresses it with the shy clarity of a hymn. That reticence tugs the viewer closer, encouraging us to listen and look rather than — as with more strident work — repelling us with shock and horror. When I ask her how she finds this equilibrium, she hesitates. “I think it may have something to do with the sense of time between us. Of time moving between generations,” she says, her hands now moving as if mimicking time’s flow. “I think if you live in a large family, you learn to listen to many views because what binds you is love. You learn to say what you want to say without breaking ties.” In a world where the failure to make space for different voices is proving catastrophic for so many, there can be fewer better lessons as we start a new year.
Article published on https://www.ft.com