Mutual Art : Shilpa Gupta: Untitled

Kestner Gesellschaft

JUN 25, 2022 - SEP 25, 2022

Shilpa Gupta's multidisciplinary practice, encompassing sound installation, drawing, and sculpture, reflects on the fragility of one's right to free expression.

Her experiential sound installation "For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit" (2017-18), draws on the artist's exploration of control and resistance through restrictions imposed on poets, while her motion "flap boards'' - traditionally found in airports or train stations - become sonic stages for an uneasy dialogue with one another, once more expanding the artist's interest in sound, language and the power of speech. Gupta states: "I am concerned with perception and therefore, with how definitions get stretched or trespassed, be it gender, beliefs, or the notion of a state."

Shilpa Gupta's video installation "Untitled", 2022, conceived especially for the Kestner Gesellschaft and exhibited on the roof of the gallery's building, turns the architecture into a living organism. Emitted texts (Time Runs Endless, Fear Fear Itself, One Sentence Ago, etc.) along with visual components, enter into a poetic-political polylogue with the city and its inhabitants, invoking notions of confinement and intimacy, but also legality and illegality, security and censorship, belonging and isolation.

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