A solo exhibition by Shilpa Gupta
Placing the abstract against the tangible, artist Shilpa Gupta’s practice engages a poetics of resistance that manifests in bodies and objects that have been subject to institutional censure. In her works, sound seeps through trans-historical time, regular objects are disassembled into irrecognition, and the state-sanctioned border exceeds its geospatial function and re-read as a tool of epistemic control. In this exhibition, the artist interrogates the ways in which power flows between the nation-state and the individual, how the centre and the periphery change scale, and how these relays affect public memory.
Gupta collects river stones, motor parts, and other banned material from border regions, and uses them in her art as an evidentiary comment on the slippages in state power. In a series of drawings, she uses pigments from marijuana extracts to sketch state insignias as observed at a border checkpoint between India and Bangladesh—such as the uniform collar of a guard, search lights, and a pair of binoculars. The apparatus of state security is immediately rendered tenuous, as the material constitution of the silhouettes points to the porous nature of the border and the impossibility of containing human movement across it. This is further conveyed in the exhibition through a ball made out of a shredded everyday garment in approximation of the length of the border-fence between said countries. No longer recognizable, the textile’s shared cultural import is subsumed into a conscious abstraction, as the artist collapses cartographic lines into an impermeable mass.
Gupta’s objects thus subvert their expected roles and offer new grounds of imagination. This further manifests in a series of cryptic phrases as they take shape on motion flapboards. An analogue mode of official communication in transit zones, these boards are equipped with a split-flap display that rotates to reveal meditations on love, mortality, surveillance, and prejudice. Replete with spelling errors and irregular spacing, the words register as an associative game, calling on our connective tissues to foreground the collective neuroses and affinities that bind society. The game is extended through a configuration of potentially dangerous weapons that are covered in fabric and displayed in a uniform syntax. Reminiscent of confiscated items in airports, the camouflaged objects only become legible on perusal. Viewers thus enter into a contract with the artist, as they are confronted with a cognitive challenge to conformism.
The challenge is reinforced in the artist’s recognition of the ability of state power to erase and mute protesting voices in favour of its own perpetuation; this concern is evinced in her engagement with language. While the tongue is absent in a metal cast of a mouth (in sharp reference to extra-judicial violence on dissidents), it becomes palpable in a room where upturned microphones turn on their expected function and become speakers instead. Reciting poetry by historically and presently incarcerated writers, the disembodied voices become haunting recitals that forge an interim community out of its listeners. The voices activate literary verses in the present moment not only to memorialize past acts of temerity in the face of state power, but also to use the literature to implore us to exercise our voices against the incumbent regime and its espousal of right-wing majoritarianism in the present moment; it is both an ode and a call to action.
The artist extends her reflections on the critical power of absencethroughwax and glass. Noting its ephemerality, Gupta creates a wax cast of her body but displays it as a series of uneven slices, horizontally placed atop each other. In another installation, a series of glass cups is vertically assembled, corresponding to the artist’s height. Precarious, poised to break, yet steadily stationed, these works gesture to a charged negative space, whereby the body is indexed in absentia. The Jailed Poets drawings affirm the narrative direction of these works, where imprisoned poets are commemorated in familiar, recognizable tableaux, but with their figures either completely absent or referred to in relative absentia. Exiled, executed, or disappeared, the poets continue to resist the official infrastructures of control through the literature that constitutes their residue.
While Gupta acknowledges the colonial genealogy of the nation-state border, she primarily foregrounds its experiential weight through her reflections on movement, free speech, and the trans-national affect of poetry. The artist insists on the capacity of the human to reformulate what already exists by reading the logic of mobility as one of exchange. A book comprising subjective outlines of countries (as drawn by people from memory) conveys this resistance to the finitude of state-sanctioned borders. Shaky, imperfect tracings of terrestrial contours reveal an eidetic national imagination that is nevertheless imperfect, distorted, and betrays the fallibility of absolutist narratives. In this exhibition, nation-states manifest as zones of belonging instead, where lines, policies, and regulations dissipate into an elastic ecology of being with.
By Najrin Islam
