New City Art : Weight of Lightness: A Review of Shilpa Gupta at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (by Mána Taylor)

Shilpa Gupta, “For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit,” 2017–2023, casts of 100 books in gunmetal, wooden and glass vitrines with light bulbs/Photo: Amant, Brooklyn, New York

“We assume that we are born with something that can’t leave us,” explains Shilpa Gupta of her project “Altered Inheritances” (2012-2014). Now on view at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMOCA) in Madison, Wisconsin as part of Shilpa Gupta’s exhibition “I did not tell you what I saw, but only what I dreamt.” “Altered Inheritances” features fragments of texts from people who have changed their names such as Nicolas Cage, who was born Nicolas Kim Coppola, among others who have made the decision to take on a different first or last name for various reasons.

Shilpa Gupta, “One Hundred Hand-drawn Maps of USA,” 2008/2023, table, fan, and book/Photo: Amant, Brooklyn, New York

“Not knowing is a part of being,” says Gupta. In one poignant work, she asked friends to draw America from memory–the shape of the United States—in a notebook using a pencil. The result is a book of outlines, sketches, none of which fully match the shape of the exact cartographical outline, but are close enough in shape to be recognizable. A simple white household fan blows toward the book of drawings, rustling the pages, revealing the multiple versions and attempts at drawing a country from memory.

Gupta’s work takes all that we know about identity and breaks it apart, dispersing the elements until they’re abstract. In other works, she takes apart elements that represent countries, such as all the stars featured in various flags. They are relinquished to the floor, where visitors can pick up a wax star and take it home with them. I was reminded of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Candles,” when I picked up a star among other stars, and felt the wax in my hands: “Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers/And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes/Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.” Such as in Félix González-Torres’ “Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)” (1991), in which visitors can take a colorful wrapped candy with them home from the museum, Gupta’s stars feel similar to taking something from a holy body.

Shilpa Gupta, “Stars on Flags of the World,” 2012/2023, stars cast in wax in proportion to the volume of artist’s body/Photo: Amant, Brooklyn, New York

Her artwork is subject to its own saintliness, imagining new modes of considering nationality and nationalism—how a flag can have such a weight to its imagery but the stars on their own perhaps don’t mean much. The exhibition also features her work about exiled poets and silenced voices. “For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit” (2023) is a work of one-hundred books cast in gunmetal, illuminated behind wooden and glass vitrines with hanging light bulbs. The one-hundred golden books represent one-hundred jailed poets, such as Osip Mandelstam, Mahjoub Sharif, César Vallejo. The exhibition is also a way to honor those who succumbed to censorship and a memorialization of all the important writers and artists who aren’t able to show their work freely. We take their names home with us, and remember them.

“Shilpa Gupta: I did not tell you what I saw, but only what I dreamt” is on view at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, 227 State Street, Madison, Wisconsin, through January 14, 2025.

Article published on https://art.newcity.com