Shilpa Gupta
APT9
Born 1976 Mumbai, India
Lives and works in Mumbai, India
Since the early 2000s, Shilpa Gupta has developed an engaging practice working with a broad range of materials and media. Text, language and poetry feature prominently in Gupta’s work. She experiments with the way language operates through a variety of means, slowly unravelling narratives through the use of various technologies, or exploring relationships between author/speaker and reader/listener. By employing simple phrases translated into several languages, she prompts viewers to think about relationships involving the self and communities. Although she prefers the term ‘everyday’ art to political art, Gupta’s practice often reflects on political and social histories and their ongoing effects, from imposed geographies and borders, to the jailing of political dissidents.
Shilpa Gupta / India b.1976 / For, in your tongue, I cannot fit 2017–18 / Sound installation with 100 speakers, microphones, printed text and metal stands / Site-specific installation / Co-commissioned by Yarat Contemporary Art Space and Edinburgh Art Festival with additional support from QAGOMA / © Shilpa Gupta / Courtesy: The artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano/Beijing/Les Moulins/Habana / Photograph: Pat Verbruggen
Poets, like artists, are dreamers, even if they’re talking about nightmares.
— Shilpa Gupta
For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit 2017–18 is Shilpa Gupta’s most recent installation. Beneath 100 hanging microphones — a device that transmits the voices of politicians, dictators, activists and revolutionaries alike — lines of poetry are transcribed on sheets of paper, skewered by metal spikes. The microphones act like speakers, delivering verses from poets who have been imprisoned, and in some cases executed, for their words.
The work features recited words in multiple languages from different periods of history, such as the eighth-century Persian poet Abū Nuwās, known for his frivolous and witty poetry about urban life and homosexual love; the sixteenth-century Italian polymath Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in 1600 for astronomical theories considered at odds with Roman Catholic doctrine; American beat poet Allen Ginsberg, accused of obscenity for his 1954–55 poem Howl; and the young Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour, imprisoned since 2015 for a poem in Arabic posted on YouTube, which was mistranslated as identifying with a terrorist organisation.
The chorus unveils instances of censorship and suppression throughout history, shining a light on those who have made sacrifices for their freedom of speech, and giving a voice to those who were not meant to be heard.
