How Shilpa Gupta’s artistic journey makes her ready for the AI storm

Artist Shilpa Gupta

The two-artist, dialogue-driven show "Shilpa Gupta & Marisa Merz: VisibleInvisible" at Maxxi Laquita, Italy, is one of those shows that go far beyond the East-West intersection which it also primarily is. Merz is a deceased artist who was once part of Italy’s Anti-Povera art movement, which was a sort of artistic defiance by replacing conventional art-making tools and materials with avant-garde display of everyday or “poor” objects and materials. Gupta’s art has been about inventive use of technology and physical, day-to-day materials to represent complex thought processes about alienation, discrimination, silencing and invisibility of marginalised communities and classes across South Asia. Together, their works represent a tension between two generations and, more importantly, it becomes a conversation about visibility and invisibility, the image and the word, the political and the philosophical.

A mock-up of the untitled site-specific installation that will be put up at the gardens of the National Gallery, Singapore, from June 3 to December 1, 2023. (Photos courtesy Shilpa Gupta)

Gupta, 49, has been representing India in contemporary art platforms across the world as an artist who uses different kinds of media — written word, technology, natural objects, constructed objects as well as classical art materials to create expansive, multi-layered, 3D installations that invite her viewers to engage and interact with her works. Among contemporary Indian artists in her age group, Gupta is the only one whose works have been shown far more in Europe than in India — part of a few private collections in India such as the Anupam Poddar collection and art consultant and collector Amrita Jhaveri’s private collection.

Her art demands a lot from the viewer, intellectually and physically, and she is among a few artists from her generation who have broken away from all norms of formal training. Gupta is a curator-favourite in many European and American galleries for her socially-engaged, multi-faceted practice. Ever since she started out after graduating from Mumbai’s JJ School of Art, her work is an ongoing exploration of how human actions and interactions are subjected to a range of external and internal stimuli, from socio-political constructs to personal relationships and technology.

The synaesthetic nature of her practice is also an inspiration of her home city — born, and brought up in Mumbai through the globalising ’90s, she comes from a Marwari family that has little to do with the arts, but the city has had its impact. Gupta’s work is in the attention of curators such as David Elliott, Massimiliano Gioni, Geraldo Mosquera, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. She is the first artist from the Asian subcontinent — a region with a booming art scene — to be chosen to be profiled in the Contemporary Artists Series.

She has even had giveaways in her shows, including during the large-scale installation Threat (2008-09), 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 pushes viewers to question their own assumptions about the world. Viewers got their own “Threat” bar when they visited the show.

In the "VisibleInvisible" exhibit, one work has her words in resplendent tungsten light blaze up a white wall; in another, glass bottles that have been spoken into, by words of censured texts, get the spotlight. She has had shows dedicated to vast subjects with historical and political gravitas, like the widows of men who have disappeared during the Kashmir conflict, border politics that propel hostility surrounding immigration from Bangladesh, and threats to free speech.

This year, she co-authored a book with Salil Tripathi titled For, In Your Tinge, I cannot Fit, which has her drawings alongside works of poets from the world over — Chinese, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, French, Urdu, Hindi, English — who have been silenced in their countries because of the offence that they heckled in their native citizens.

Shilpa Gupta's 'For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit'.

The eponymous show, which ran at Mumbai’s Chemould Prescott Road in 2017-18 besides several venues across the world, is a multi-channel immersive sound installation — an outcome of a years-long research project into persecuted poets across time and geographies. The physical installation spans over 3,000 sq. ft and includes 100 microphones suspended from the ceiling. They play an audio loop of snippets of poems whose authors have been subjected to imprisonment, detainment, and execution. The poems are dated from the eighth century to contemporary times, allowing visitors to experience over a thousand years of global poetry in an hour. With this work, Gupta gives the microphone back to those who were rendered voiceless. As the artist herself says, in the middle of working on a forthcoming show in June in Singapore, in which she will use “Activity” or actual worksheets on which viewers can work on her ideas at her Bandra studio, “Often, as it is happening right now, the voices of the truth cause discomfort and are cut off, yet the echo remains and continues to be heard. As you might have noticed, because of the current atmosphere, abstract art is making a comeback, which is not literal or direct like, say, any figurative or work or works like mine.”

The book, already ready for a second print run, replicates this seminal show and makes it more accessible to people beyond a gallery space. Gupta isn’t an artist whose works are seen in India often. “It could’ve something to do with the scale and the infrastructure required,” the artist tells me. Her kind of large-scale multi-media works don’t have enough collectors in India and because of the nature of her socio-political messaging, may not even be as appreciated as they are in Europe. “I am constantly trying to keep myself and my art alive. So each work requires me to learn new crafts, new processes,” she says.

Gupta has three forthcoming solos through 2023 and 2024 — in Singapore, Spain and New York. “I have no idea when I will have my next solo in India,” she says. This year, the London-based Phaidon Books, a 100-year-old publishing house known for its distinguished roster of art book, published a monograph on Gupta, There Is No Border by Alexandra Munroe, Nav Haq, and Elvira Dyangani Ose.

The monograph on Shilpa Gupta by Phaidon Books

The National Gallery of Singapore has commissioned a site-specific installation by her (June 3-December 1), in which two large inflatable bodies are seen interlocked in a combative position. Upon going around the work, one realises that they are perched on a single head — pointing to the social struggles and dualities we experience within ourselves and our surroundings and responding to a space surrounded by signposts of a large metropolis with dissonant realities.

At the Amant gallery in Brooklyn, New York, her solo will run from October 5  to April 2, 2024; at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, another solo will open on 27 October. She is also working on a solo for the Centro Botin Gallery in Santander, Spain (15 March-24 September 2024).

Almost all of Gupta’s works have the quality of mediation — through words, technology, sound — which possibly makes her a natural fit for an art world in which AI can heighten an art experience or, at least, change the way artists can make art. “It’s a storm we can’t stop, can we? I believe it will tell us something about ourselves that we don’t know,” Gupta says, with hope and eagerness. In 2007, when I had met her for an interview, she’d told me, “The Web is an extension of my daily reality, and no other medium can be more potent.”

Shilpa Gupta's Blessed-bandwidth.net.

She went on to revolutionise how the internet can be used in art, including a radical series, Blessed-Bandwidth.net commissioned by Tate Modern, London, in which she playfully lured her audience to download blessings and wishes from a Web interface created by her.