ART-PRESENTATION: Shilpa Gupta-Today Will End
Shilpa Gupta is interested in perception, and in the ways in which we transmit and understand information. Her mediums range from manipulated found objects to video, interactive computer-based installation, and performance. Her work often engages with television and its constant flow of meaning. Shifting the primary status of art from object-based commodity to participatory experience, Gupta creates situations that actively involve the viewer.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: M HKA Archive
Considering technology as an extension of body and mind, Shilpa Gupta possesses a sharp political consciousness towards the role, psychology and aesthetics of different media forms, particularly towards their complicity in the production of fear. Though her works could be interpreted as referring to the social or political situation of specific cultural or national contexts, Gupta keeps them decidedly open, allowing their themes to be interpreted differently wherever and whenever they are exhibited. The first mid-career survey exhibition of Gupta, entitled “Today Will End”, brings together many of her key works for the first time. As one of the established artists of the Mumbai contemporary art scene to have emerged since the 1990s, this exhibition offers an overview of the practice Gupta has been developing for more than twenty years. The exhibition considers the evolution of her work over this period, foregrounding the speculative nature of her practice, as well as the depth of her critical engagement with psychology, behaviour, politics and language. Considering technology as an extension of body and mind, Shilpa Gupta possesses a sharp political consciousness towards the role, psychology and aesthetics of different media forms, particularly towards their complicity in the production of fear. Though her works could be interpreted as referring to the social or political situation of specific cultural or national contexts, Gupta keeps them decidedly open, allowing their themes to be interpreted differently wherever and whenever they are exhibited. The materials play a crucial element in Gupta’s art practice and she engages with it in an unprecedented way to push the viewers to see it as part of her visual language and aesthetic. Gupta explains this, “I am interested in how meaning is created and methods are employed to generate narratives, be it via amplification, erasure, or obliteration. Be it a flap board found in a transit zone, a microphone that stands between the speaker and listener, a garment that is smuggled, a soap that melts away, the material carries narratives of movement and slippages. In fact, one of the reasons I tend to change mediums is to avoid the weight of a style which can become restrictive”. In the work “For, In Your Tongue I Cannot Fit” (2017-18), running across the entire first floor gallery space, 100 microphones are suspended above 100 metal rods, each piercing a page inscribed with a verse of poetry. In turn, a single microphone plays these verses, echoed by a chorus of the other 99. Lasting over an hour, the sound piece alternates between English, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Azeri and Hindi, amongst other languages. One of the artist’s central pieces to the exhibition is the “Singing Cloud” (2008-09) that is a suspended sculpture built from 4,000 reverse-wired black microphones. the static mass emits from the microphones a jumbled sound created by the reconfiguration of responses given by several individuals as they process images aloud. a nine minute and thirty second audio channel produced by the piece is played on repeat as the sound rhythmically flutters across the surface of the piece, moving from one side of the cloud to the other. the abstracted quality of the psychological testing sound-bites echo the strangeness of the hovering dark creature-cloud. the cluster seems to be an ominous floating object representative of modern notions of anxiety, surveillance and security, softly singing to itself in the echoing gallery space. The installation “Threat” (2008-09) is a work made of a wall of soap designed to look like individual bricks, with the word “threat” written across each one. By employing an impermanent material like soap to evoke objects as long-lasting as bricks, Gupta seeks to push viewers to question their own assumptions about the world. The wall drawing “Untitled (There is No Border Here)” (2005-06) is made from self-adhesive tape in which ‘there is no border here’ has been written on the yellow strips, spelling out a sentiment written by the artist in block lettering which reads: “I tried very hard to cut the sky in half, one for my lover and one for me, but the sky kept moving and the clouds from his territory came into mine. I tried pushing it away, with both my hands, harder and harder but the sky kept moving and clouds from my territory went into his. I brought a sofa and placed it in the middle, but the clouds kept floating over it. i built a wall in the middle, but the sky started to flow through it. I dug a trench, and then it rained and the sky made clouds over the trench. I tried very hard to cut…”
Photo: Shilpa Gupta, Threat, 2008-2009, Bathing soaps, 15 × 6.2 × 4 cm each soap, 72 x 229 x 107 cm stack of 4.500 soaps, Courtesy: the artist. Photographer: Didier Bamoso
Info: Curator: Nav Haq, M HKA – Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Leuvenstraat 32, Antwerp, Belgium, Duration: 21/5-12/9/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00 (must buy tickets in advance), www.muhka.be
