Frieze : Shilpa Gupta Meditates on Silence’s Weight (by Vanessa Holyoak)

The artist’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.

Shilpa Gupta, ‘Some suns fell off’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles; photograph: Jeff McLane

Set against the backdrop of the authoritarian political moment unfolding in the United States – marked by a government obsessed with enforcing arbitrary restrictions on freedom through the policing of national borders – the fibre-based works in Gupta’s exhibition quietly illuminate the invisible threads that bind us. Stars on Flags of the World, July 2011 (2012–23), a large-scale hanging embroidery outlining unravelling stars from various national flags, and 1:7690 (2023), a glass-encased ball of shredded fabric made from contraband garments carried across the Indian-Bangladeshi border, invoke the symbolic and material traces of political ley lines that dictate the movement of bodies and objects.

In Untitled (2023), a single hanging lightbulb and microphone slowly rotate in an otherwise-unlit space as Gupta’s voice recites the names of 100 poets who were detained and incarcerated – and in some cases, executed – by their respective states for reasons ranging from political dissidence to sexual orientation. The room’s apparent emptiness reverberates with the violence underlying the repression of these voices. Gupta’s tendency toward material and sonic restraint sharpens the viewer’s awareness of the lacunae that underpin her work – whether through the invocation of silenced poets in her sound installation or in the depictions of hollow silhouettes being violently apprehended by state forces in her drawing series ‘Nothing Will Go on Record’ (2016/23).

Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2023, microphone, speaker, sound, bulb, print on paper, wood, diameter: 2.4 m, in Shilpa Gupta, ‘Some suns fell off’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles; photograph: Jeff McLane

By foregrounding absence and negative space, she underscores the fragility of seemingly rigid political constructs. A copper-pipe sculpture outlining the United States, Map Tracing #8 – US (2021), appears unwieldy and misshapen: a caricature of a country fixated on the solidity of its borders. A tabletop installation features a fan blowing through a sketchbook filled with maps of the US, its contours shifting according to the vagaries of memory and the whims of mechanically induced airflow (100 Hand-drawn Maps of USA, 2008/23). For this project, Gupta invited 100 US residents to draw their chosen home from memory, exposing the instability of the territorial demarcations of nationhood. Throughout the show, Gupta stages invisible forces as the arbiters of human freedom, granting affective weight to the unspoken residues of language and memory.

Shilpa Gupta, SOUND ON MY SKIN, 2025, motion flapboard, 24 × 238 × 13 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York / Los Angeles; photograph: Jeff McLane

Particularly haunting is the larger-than-life installation SOUND ON MY SKIN (2025), a black split-flap display suspended from the ceiling of the central gallery, evoking the shifting signage and atmosphere of a transit station, markedly devoid of its usual commotion. The gallery’s silence is ruptured only by the shuffling of the board as it displays phrases such as ‘WORD SHATTERS SOUNDLESSLY’ and ‘NO AIR FOR ME TO HEAR MYSELF’. The words, rendered in all caps, read like shouts heard by no one – signs of life echoing in a void. I am reminded again of Blanchot’s intentionally opaque musings: ‘He wrote, whether this was possible or not, but he did not speak. Such is the silence of writing.’ Gupta’s exhibition makes the case for art’s silence as a form of writing: when our voices are suppressed, we may still, impossibly, write.

Shilpa Gupta, ‘Some suns fell off’ is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, until 29 March

Article published on https://www.frieze.com