‘Lines of Flight’ marks Shilpa Gupta’s first solo exhibition in West Asia. Featuring a diverse selection of artworks from 2006 to the present that include a new sound installation, site-specific interventions, sculptures, drawings, prints and videos, the exhibition foregrounds Gupta’s longstanding critical engagement with narratives of mobility, control and acts of resilience.
Over the last two and a half decades, Shilpa Gupta’s interdisciplinary art practice has challenged how individual and collective identities are perceived, governed and orchestrated by the state and societal forces. Her work questions how people, places, everyday objects and languages get recast through nationality, gender and economic relations. By focusing on moments of unrest, Gupta’s work encourages viewers to participate in imagining a new poetics of resistance.
Lines have occupied an important place in Gupta’s art practice since the beginning of her career. Her work has frequently examined how modern systems of power and control depend on linear forms. From drawing national borders to declaring one’s ancestry through bloodlines and surnames, lines become the single most effective tool for political and social organisation. Gupta’s work plays with such concrete and symbolic lines, subverting them through the friction of everyday encounters between the individual, the community and the state.
The exhibition brings together Gupta’s exploration of technologies of information. Flap-boards used for displaying train departure times relay broken words and phrases; documents used in administrative offices become haikus of witness testimonies; and microphones used for public announcements conceal speakers that convey voices of poets incarcerated for their beliefs. Each work in the exhibition demands a closer look, a deeper listening, to realise how every apparatus that tries to enforce limits is always transcended, and how every line that creates boundaries is surpassed by another line of new horizons.
Upon entering the exhibition, the viewer is confronted by an image of an outstretched hand from the series ‘6, 10.3, 2’. Created in 2021, the series expresses the heightened sensation of time and distance experienced by innumerable people in lockdown imposed during the recent global pandemic. ‘6’ in the title refers to the minimum social distance to be maintained in feet, ’10.3’ refers to the same distance measured by Gupta’s palm, and ‘2’ refers to the minimum social distance that was to be maintained in metres.
The first gallery of the show presents artworks that invite viewers to consider how voices and thought extend beyond the forces that try to restrict those who speak them. Gupta has made several works that regard poets and the ramifications of their poetry in the face of rising intolerance. ‘A Liquid, The Mouth Froze’ hangs on the wall comprising a cast of a human mouth in gun metal. Next to the sculpture is a brass plate strung on a nail inscribed by a short account of an unseemly incident. The work is part of Gupta’s wider investigation into the fate of those considered a threat by state power. The gun metal and the enigmatic text allude to extra-judicial violence against individuals who maintain language as a personal freedom beyond prescribed uses. Surrounding the gallery are works from the ‘Untitled (Jailed Poet Drawings)’ series that also consider language as a medium of resistance. The drawings outline silhouettes of missing or imprisoned poets, behind wooden frames designed to remind the onlooker of prison bars. Each drawing is accompanied by a fragment of text.
In the far end of the gallery is a wall drawing titled ‘There is No Border Here’, made out of barrier tape that draws out a flag. The text 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 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 the 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…”. The work is a reminder that flags which have stood for symbols of freedom are also the very instruments that limit it by means of social exclusion based on national belonging, ideology, caste, creed and race.
Turning into the second gallery, one encounters the ‘Untitled (Smoke Series)’. The set of 12 digital prints shows a cloud of smoke in various interior settings of what could be a home or an office. The nebulous mass hovers along sharp edges and passes through narrow slits. An evocation of threat to boundaries has often been the most potent way to enforce closing off the inside from the outside, and therein, of the insider from the outsider. In photographic terms, the series asks whether there can ever be a sharp focus on an undefined entity. Across from the photographs is a kinetic installation titled ‘StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream’. Two flap-boards, conventionally found in airports and train stations, are suspended from the ceiling. Rather than announcing departure and arrival times, Gupta disrupts the viewer’s expectations by relaying fragments of words and phrases in dialogue between the two boards. The work evokes a conversation interrupted by a sudden announcement of departure, or trying to build a bridge across two unfamiliar languages. The installation expands on the artist’s interest in sound, language and different mediums of communication, inviting the viewer to sit and watch the whirr and chatter of words exchanged.
The third gallery presents a new and ambitious installation by Gupta titled ‘Listening Air’. Merging text and sculpture into a dynamic choreography, the artwork comprises five suspended microphones, each counterbalanced by a dim light fixture, that orbit around the darkened gallery between visitors. Upturning their function, the microphones serve as speakers reciting poetry that has travelled vast distances. The work includes, among others, a poem by Pakistan’s poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz that became the protest anthem sung in university campuses across India; Italian songs sung by women who worked as rice-paddy farmers that found revival in the recent years’ farmers protests in India; a martyr’s song in the central-Indian language Gondi; and a rendition of a text by the poet and environmental activist from Nigeria, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Together, the songs make a claim for hope, resistance and a shared space for diversity.
The centrepiece of the fourth gallery is an interactive artwork, ‘Untitled’, consisting of a table with numerous closed envelopes containing shredded documents pertaining to the abuse of power by the state around the Bangladesh – India border. An instruction is signposted at one end of the table that reads, “Take away one. Open after crossing 150 yards – the distance between the zero line and the fence where no defensive structure is permitted”. On the walls surrounding this sculpture are various artworks pertaining to the Bangladesh – India border. An ‘Untitled’ set of six drawings are made using codeine-based cough syrup, Phensedyl. Produced in India, the medicine is illegally sold in Bangladesh. Aside from its medicinal purposes, the syrup has also been widely used as a narcotic leading to widespread addiction along the borderland. Another set of six line-drawings titled ‘Drawings Made in the Dark’ refer to the clandestine routes, memorised and made familiar across the intricately linked region between Bangladesh and India. On the opposite wall is a work titled ‘A0 – A5’ created using thread and pencil on handwoven cloth from Phulia, an Indo-Bangladesh border town. Each frame, in gradually ascending scale of standard paper sizes, is inscribed with a ratio comparing the length of the line on the cloth with the length of the fenced border. A video projected at the far end of the gallery depicts a partial view of a volleyball game. ‘Will it be alright if we win?’ captures a group of people from an enclave of India within Bangladesh playing with the Border Security Force. Organised by a non-governmental organisation, the game has a foreboding play of power looming between those who live on the edge of statelessness and those that safeguard states. The video focuses on the feet of young men having fun in a moment of ease, overlayed with sounds from nature that are seamlessly connected across the two sides of the border.
Shilpa Gupta: Lines of Flight celebrates the practice of a contemporary artist who is deeply committed to voices of emancipation that transcend borders, imposed silences and conventions. The exhibition is curated by Sabih Ahmed, Director of the Ishara Art Foundation, and will be accompanied by physical and virtual tours, as well as educational and public programmes.
Artworks for the exhibition have been loaned from the Art Jameel Collection, Pooja Jhaver and the Ishara Art Foundation and the Prabhakar Collection.
The exhibition has been generously supported by Carl F. Bucherer, with insurance support from Emirates Insurance Company, and logistical support from Galleria Continua, neugerriemschneider, and Vadehra Art Gallery.
