Shaped by her interest in research and pedagogy, Shilpa Gupta’s body of work invites an open-ended and reciprocal dialogue with the communities with whom her work interacts and the larger public that explores her work.
The Mumbai-based artist shows a series of works concerning a consistent theme within her practice: the invisible structures of control affecting both the individual and the collective, from geopolitical borders and their forms of operation to inter-personal boundaries and the mechanisms they impose on everyday behaviors. Especially significant in these groups of works is the use of language, mediated by specific structures based on race, gender, class and religion. Through media installations, sculptures and drawings, Shilpa remarks how language conditions borders and shapes political relations, as well as the subjective imagination and the ability to interpret different social landscapes.
In her work, maps, and national symbols function as schemes that physically and morally separate geographical areas, projecting the political imagination in favor of or against certain groups of people and their beliefs. Maps collect data, mark distances and measurements, but they also obliterate the web of affinities between communities and their unofficial storytelling.
In this regard, Gupta emphasizes the effect of censorship, focusing on what could be called the “reverse” of discourse, the absence of language, or what cannot be said. As Shilpa suggests, this reversal “can take place in an authoritative mode of history writing and censorship, or simply even in how our actions are largely controlled by the unconscious.” That is why the space of literature, poetry, and dreams also becomes an open playground within her work. She opens what she calls “a space between our desires and our realities, of which we do not know enough” and so facilitates new possibilities and hopes, counteracting the experience of censorship.
Having grown up in South Asia, a space marked by many shifting lines, her work has always claimed a space for agency and projection. Although her practice is influenced by her context, Gupta keeps her works open; allowing their themes to be interpreted differently wherever and whenever they are exhibited. She interrogates the notions of diversity and cultural exchange that some countries have used in their political discourse in opposition to the way conquest and segregation have shaped the concept of nation-state; from creating physical and visible borders and migration flows to invisible ones, targeting communities that are permanently vulnerable, unable to access capital, exercising their citizenship rights.
For her exhibition at Amant, Shilpa will present new commissions alongside works from the past fifteen years, as well as a series of educational projects. This series of learning activities form an integral part of the exhibition and allow for the creation of intergenerational exchange and forms of interaction in a critical yet interactive way.
at Amant, New York
until April 28, 2024