Hall 2, Booth D11
https://www.artbasel.com/basel
The curation includes a collection of vintage prints from three important series in Gupta’s oeuvre –
London 1982, Lovers: Ten Years On and Exiles – photographed and produced over the 1980s in
London, England, and Delhi, India. This special curation divulges the oppressive cultural apparatuses
within which sub-cultures were overpowered and rendered invisible in the throes of mainstream
society in London and Delhi in the 1980s. Whether visualizing the issue of invisible sub-cultures in
London or the manufactured absence of gay Indian men, Gupta’s approach to the public site and its
impact on private experiences raises interesting points of similarity and difference between two
historically connected countries and their social sciences. England’s colonization of India left the latter
with a kind of Victorian cultural hangover, where the act of labelling, of naming and shaming, has
been promulgated for generations. Gupta notes the ruptures in such a shared legacy, drawing a
parallel between the anxiety, oppression and threat of exposure in London with the more liminal yet
equally insecure experience in Delhi in the 1980s.
