There are no spelling mistakes here. These typos are intentional

(from left) 'There Is No Explosive in This - Objects Confiscated at the Airport' and 'StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream', were installed at Bikaner House, Delhi, from February 2-14, 2025.

"As feelings / feel / feel like / facts / fcats I hdie from myself / sldie / repeat / repeat to become trtuhs / half repeat to become trtuhs/ privileged truths... tlriuetsh." Watching the 35-minute poem play out over motion flapboards in artist Shilpa Gupta's 'StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream' at Bikaner House, one is struck by a few things.

One, the typos—sldie, trtuhs, insdie, hdie, lvoe, mriror, spaek, snik, suonds—are obviously intentional. Not only do they draw attention to themselves as you watch the hypnotic motion of the flapboards revealing—word by word—a stream-of-consciousness poem by the artist, but they often enact and/or reinforce the meaning.

The word fcats evokes fat cats, and facts distorted. Hdie has the word hide hidden insdie/inside. Sldie / slide. Dsiappear / disappear. Trtuhs / truths. Tlriuetsh / truth-lies. Mriror / mirror (distorted). The difficulty of spaeking / speaking. Things that make her skin crawl / snik, or muffle the suond / sound of dissent. And a lvoe / love that demands proof of loyalty.

Shilpa Gupta's 'StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream'. The motion flapboards are of the kind you might have once seen at airports and other transit stations before they were largely replaced with digital versions. The physical boards make a sound - like chips falling - every time they roll.

Two, method and medium work together in this work to achieve an effect that neither could have done on its own. Because the motion flapboards whirr and stop at each letter of each word in each line individually, Shilpa Gupta can add or subtract letters or edit minimally to convey something.

Adding "not" in a sentence to reverse its meaning. Changing a letter / a few letters / a word to change what the sentence conveys ("In love / In love is fear/ Of losing / Of losing grip / Over you, over me --- RIP"). Unleashing a pause, causing the boards to flap furiously for several seconds before landing on blanks. Gupta deploys all these ways to build the work, as if the letters were bricks that can be stacked or staggered, placed close together or far apart, or split unevenly across the two 32-character flapboards that are suspended from the ceiling and angled towards each other. The whirring of the flapboard pieces as they change makes a sound—another physical marker of change—that is a crucial cue for viewers to know where to look.

Three, those ruing the fate of poetry in the 21st century, or in the age of artificial intelligence, and especially now in the so-called season of love when variations of "roses are red" abound on e-greetings and OTT films, may take solace in how the letters and flapboards work to produce meaning and feeling here. (Incidentally, February 14 - 2025 Valentine's Day - is the final day of Gupta's solo show at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Bikaner House.)

Four, the typos bring to mind ways of encrypting messages.

In the contemporary context, these errors could be seen as ways to momentarily beat Web crawlers and perhaps also AI aggregators. Like the "adversarial attacks" and "fooling images" tech experts use to confuse AI about the real contents of the page. But, of course, the code here is easily cracked, and offers only temporary protection.

Five, 'StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream' touches upon many of the subjects that have interested Gupta for many years—transit zones, the liminal places between belonging and new beginnings, language, and speaking truth to power.

The whole process of writing and placing the text takes Gupta up to a quarter of a year.

"I sit with these texts; I literally print them out on paper and I cut them," Gupta said in a chance meeting at Bikaner House on Sunday. "It's actually a very physical process. I then lay these fragments on the floor and can spend days shifting them around, adding something, or removing parts... During this period, I have to isolate myself, be alone, and stay with the text."

Gupta, who studied sculpture at the Sir JJ School of Fine Art (1992-96), spoke to Moneycontrol about the importance of typos and sound in 'StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream', her process for making motion flapboards, why borders interest her, winning the 2025 Possehl Prize for International Art and why she's looking forward to putting her feet up "not for a moment, but weeks" next. Edited excerpts:

You've written the words yourself. How are you thinking about their placement—because apart from the typos, you are also sort of adjusting the text to fit the medium?

My process is quite unconscious—I write in a stream-of-thought manner, all through the year. Then, after two or three years have passed, I reach a moment when I feel ready to step back and look at the text. Since 2008, I have worked on four to five flapboards.

It’s a multidirectional process—two-way, three-way, even more. I sit with these texts, printing them out and cutting them into fragments. It’s a rather physical process—something I am not quite able to do on the screen. I lay them on the floor and spend days shifting them around, adding and removing parts. During this period, I have to isolate myself, be alone, and stay with the text. Then, at some point, I sit with the actual board—which can be for over several weeks, over a month, or two, even three when I feel the work seems ready.

Over the years, I have gotten to know the board more and more, which allows me to anticipate the flow of the work. Infact what I spend a lot of time is on, is timing, which is a delicate and sometimes excruciating and slow process.

Are you thinking about the time it takes people to read and absorb the text? And are you using the typos as something that stands out?

Constantly. It's like when you work with paint, every stroke (matters). So with the text, every character matters.

Also, the sound is a cue to where to look?

I'm glad you picked that up. Sound is something I feel very close to in my practice. The sound, the timing—it’s all part of making the flapboards.

Shilpa Gupta's Listening Air (multi-channel sound installation, speakers, microphones, lights, printed text on metal stands; 2019-23)

There are bits where the flapboard turns and then there is blank space. Is there a particular meaning to the blanks?

While a flapboard typically runs for about 30 minutes, it is composed of fragments that come from the way I write and then weave everything together. The pause is very intentional—it marks the beginning of a new part.

What about transit and borders interests you?

I think growing up as a woman in South Asia, we are always surrounded by lines in different ways—do’s and don’ts. I went to art school in 1992, a moment of great change. I remember often returning back from the art school as it was shut due to unrest in the city. Something had shifted. Some parts of cosmopolitan dream shattered. Distances between people, even living close to each other increased, accentuated and stretched.

I found myself in Kashmir. When you look at the nation-state from its edges, it appears very different from the city center. What does it mean to inhabit a place where borders are drawn overnight. Those questions took me to the Bengal borderlands. It was a very different kind of experience. I went once, then again—it kept drawing me back. Here I saw the making and unmaking of the world's longest fence, which India is building to encircle Bangladesh. And yet, despite that, a vast subversive trade persists at the border. It's the people-to-people connection; the social and historical affinities; it's the geographical continuity and the economic imperative. Borders divide but borders also join people.

I'm interested in how is it that we as people are constantly defining ourselves, marking things around us, and then we struggle with it. We are the makers of time, we are always struggling with time. We are very organic beings afterall. One of the first things we did, is we stood up and we walked, from four limbs to onto two, which made us humans. We walked. Mobility is part of who we are and what we are. I am interested in how movement is intrinsic to us. And then nation states, which are barely a few hundred years and take on this near impossible task of building and then maintaining fencing. And that goes against us being human.

Shilpa Gupta's 'Thoughts from your head don't let me sleep' began as a drawing, and then became a neon installation and printed T-shirt, too.

How are you thinking about the form that your works take? There are flapboards, drawings, installations—sound and light, tracings on paper... just in this exhibition.

It slips. Like 'Thoughts from your head don't let me sleep' was actually first a drawing, which I made it as a print as a proposal for an outdoor light installation over seven or eight years ago. Woh hua nai (It didn't work out). That happens; getting permission for outdoor works takes a long time, there are opportunities, failures. But that piece also appears in flapboard. It also appears on a T-shirt. So it is fluid.

I am drawn to the flapboard, both in terms of what it is and from where -  its form and its materiality. It’s a creature from the transit zones. The work allows me to speak of fragmentation, work with a space where meaning is in transition - is not yet solidified through a dominant interpretation. Like ourselves, we are many different beings. We tend to define ourselves, but in truth, we are complex. We do not fully accept how complicated we are or how we exist in multiple places simultaneously. How fragmented we truly are—that is what interests me.

It’s for the same reason I am drawn to the microphone. It is an object where typically something gets amplified, but there is also something else which might not. Therefore, I embed speakers and reverse their functionality. Voices less heard travel through their insides to create a space for listening.

What next, after this show is done?

Right after a solo opens at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in LA. Then after that, I am looking forward to a moment of pause before embarking on a project at the Manchester International Festival which opens in July. I have received a prize (Possehl Prize for International Art, announced in December 2024) from Germany which is given to an artist once in three years. It comes along with a major institutional solo in the north of Germany (in Kunsthalle St Annen) in Lübeck (slated to open on 27 September 2025). Like that there's always something… Then it's a moment of pause.

But you want to take a minute before you get on to the next thing?

Not a minute. Weeks, months maybe.