Installations that aren’t aloof

Nonika Singh

Call her a political activist, liberal thinker or cutting edge artist, internationally acclaimed Shilpa Gupta is a voice that resonates and echoes concerns that deal with a multitude of issues. There is no pigeonhole in which you can confine her or her art.

Concerned more with the possibility of art than the simple making and of creating images, she has been questioning/contemplating what objects truly stand for, since the beginning of her art practice. Back in time, as a college student, she posted unsigned drawings to 300 people, each stamped with a suggestion: dispose of after use. The idea was to understand whether art is an experience or merely an object worthy of possession.

Constantly blurring the notion of authorship and ownership, she brings the viewer into her work by asking them to draw maps or insisting that they take something away from her exhibition. She reasons: “The work slips into different contexts. Say, when it moves from an art gallery to an unfamiliar domestic context... perhaps slipped into your wardrobe, or placed on the bathroom counter or if you walk the streets with it, the meaning and how you look at it can alter.”

Growing up in cosmopolitan Mumbai, she has been a witness to the rupturing of the maximum city and the shift in people’s thought process. She adds, “Being a woman makes you more conscious of the other.” Identity has been her concern for a long time. Shaken by the sectarian violence of the 1993 Mumbai riots, she has since worked around the contentious concept which, she agrees, is hard to define. “Identity straddles between what you might be and what you imagine yourself to be and what others imagine you to be.” Contexts and where you are placed also defines people and places.

The time spent in Srinagar made her realise how its history, as people outside the Valley, is different from what is remembered by those living there and how the relative calm of its tourist zone does not match the experience of the tense inner city. As she says, “Some places just never leave you,” her preoccupation manifested in Untitled (Wives of the Disappeared). It addressed the concerns of women in Kashmir whose husbands have gone missing and cannot be declared dead by the state.

In her Blame series, she took around bottles containing simulated blood in trains. If the underlying question was whose blood is it, it also underlined the pertinent. “Blaming you makes me feel so good, so I Blame you for what you cannot control, Your Religion, Your Nationality, I want to Blame you, it makes me feel so good.”

At Kochi-Muziris Biennale and now at Venice Biennale, in her work, For In Your Tongue, I cannot Fit, she brings back silenced poets of the world who took on the establishment and were jailed for their beliefs. Her sound installation — comprising 100 microphones/speakers suspended from the ceiling — speaks fragment of a poem and then 99 microphones go in repeat mode. Then another speaks and 99 repeat, as though in solidarity. “These,” she says, “are the voices of the multitude, which are often unheard in times when a few polarising loud voices start dominating the landscape.”

She says the atmosphere today is becoming restrictive. “Liberal thinkers, writers and filmmakers are being targeted. We live in strange times, if being secular or liberal is looked upon with discomfort,” she says.

Shilpa doesn’t think artists are wary of being dubbed political or shy of making political statements. However, she does feel that the term political artist has been overused. Though politics invariably informs her art, she would not like to limit herself with definitions or hem her creativity by repeating herself. She redefines her vocabulary as per the need to respond to her environment.

Interestingly, after graduating from the JJ School of Art, Shilpa didn’t become a full-fledged artist for 10 long years. Doing odd jobs, working in the world of graphic design, animation, etc., digital media became her tool by default. As her interactive works help her gain wider audiences, art illiteracy is a word she doesn’t know. She has sat on the roadside with her art works and found responses from a cross section of people — ranging from the un-schooled to an octogenarian couple closing on to exactly what she thought.

Challenging established ways of art practice through a host of mediums, she loves to create with random objects which “carry narratives of their own”. “I am interested in the interplay of contexts,” she says.

If art tells stories about shifting perceptions, she shifts the established paradigm of art and makes viewers more than participants. On the streets of Cincinnati, during her solo show, she distributed balloons with the words, ‘I want to live with no fear’, written all over them. Travelling to museums, biennales or artists initiatives, she feels that “unlike South Asia, where non-profit platforms are scarce, overseas there is a particular infrastructure which takes art closer to the general audience.”

Currently showcasing at the 58th edition of the Venice Biennale apart from her sound work on poets, a moving iron gate’s urgency of movement finds a match in the state of hysteria, which made her subvert the function of microphone and convert it into a speaker. The enthused response to her art at Venice is gratifying. But she doesn’t have time to revel in the glory of being one of the only three Indian artists to be selected as part of the main exhibition by curator Ralph Rugoff. Or even unwind. “There are non-stop deadlines to meet.” She is already on to her next projects; one of them shall be exhibited in Australia. It will once again be a work where viewers will be allowed to take a part of it. Clearly, her art is not a standalone event, but replete with sociological dimensions and psychological inflections. But then, art, for her, is an object that acquires meaning as it grows. Only, she lends it many meanings and contexts all the while fusing and redefining boundaries; manmade on the face of the earth and those that exist in the lexicon of art.

Also showing

• Gauri Gill is showcasing two of her series, Becoming, 2003-ongoing, and Acts of Appearance
• Soham Gupta’s Angst shows the nightlife of Kolkata, revealing how some of the city's most vulnerable inhabitants live