The term she gives her practice is ‘everyday art’ and to know more about this extremely engaging and moving ideology, I connected with one of the most important names in contemporary art, Shilpa Gupta.

Poetry, politics, and glowing light installations: why Shilpa Gupta’s radical sound pieces are turning quiet whispers into loud art hype – and why collectors are watching closely.

A symphony of 100 forbidden, censored voices: in For, in your tongue, I cannot fit, Shilpa Gupta gives voice to poets who have been imprisoned throughout history for their writings or their beliefs.

The awarding of the Possehl-Prize for International Art 2025 to Shilpa Gupta is not merely an accolade, but the celebration of one of the most urgent and conceptually penetrating voices in the contemporary art scene. The Indian artist, born in 1976 and based in Mumbai, inaugurates her first significant solo museum exhibition in Germany on this occasion: “we last met in the mirror”, hosted at the Kunsthalle St. Annen in Lübeck.

What happens when art crosses real borders — and people get punished for it ?
In How Shilpa Gupta Reinterprets Lines of Control, Mark Rappolt explores the artist’s haunting soundscapes, smuggled textiles, and bottled poems that speak to censorship, exile, and resistance.
This isn’t just art about borders — it’s art that challenges their very existence.
Visually striking and politically urgent, Gupta’s work asks: can belief survive repression ?

Galleria Continua welcomes contemporary Indian artist Shilpa Gupta back to its San Gimignano space with a new solo exhibition. Recognised as one of the leading international voices of her generation, Gupta presents works centred on her continued exploration of 'mobility, control and acts of resilience' at the show running from May 3 – August 31, 2025. It also includes a newly commissioned art installation created specifically for the auditorium of the former cinema-theatre in Italy.

Her art pieces are not the typical visual format of expression, rather Gupta’s installations often center around the act of listening as a basic gesture. From Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems to farmers’ songs, here moving sound acts as a form of defiance, turning it into an immersive process for the audience.

"Some Suns Fell Off" at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery reframes nationalism through poetic fragments and disrupted forms that lay bare the inherent arbitrariness of our ideological constructions. Nationalism, religious fundamentalism, social identity and political polarization are themes Gupta has frequently addressed in her work. They manifest here with renewed resonance as the exhibition opened in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. election.

The Shilpa Gupta's minimalist interventions at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, grapple with absence, erasure and exile. In his treatise on literature’s relationship to loss and the limits of representation, The Writing of the Disaster (1980), Maurice Blanchot suggests that ‘[w]hoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country – his own – where he is not a prophet’. For the French theorist, writing is inextricably linked to absence, erasure and exile, shaped by the spectre of what cannot be said. This negative space left behind by writing – and, indeed, by art – finds poignant expression in Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s solo presentation at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, ‘Some suns fell off’. Through a series of minimalist interventions, Gupta articulates the keenly felt absences of voices exiled from public life, while probing incorporeal structures that shape systems of control, such as the nation-state.

Shilpa Gupta, who lives and works in Mumbai, India, has won the Possehl Prize for International Art 2025. She will receive €25,000, while a solo exhibition of her work at Kunsthalle St. Annen in Lübeck will open on 27 September 2025.Gupta is the third artist to win the prize, which is awarded every three years, following Doris Salcedo and Matt Mullican. For over two decades she has explored religion, censorship, freedom of expression in her multidsciplinary work, looking in particular at state boundaries, geographic and psychological borders, and questions of national identity. The jury highlighted her sensitive handling of political issues, as well as her use of the wide range of media in her practice, which spans sound-based works, video projections, drawings, interactive digital installations and performances.

New Delhi – The Italian Embassy Cultural Centre, in collaboration with the British Council, hosted an evocative evening of art and culture in continuing with its Artecinema Film Festival. The event featured the screening of two insightful documentary films: Anish Kapoor – Descension (directed by Matteo Frittelli) and Shilpa Gupta (directed by Alyssa Verbizh), showcasing the brilliance and depth of two internationally acclaimed contemporary artists. […] Directed by Alyssa Verbizh (2009), a documentary profiles Shilpa Gupta, a Mumbai-based artist whose multidisciplinary works probe themes of identity, societal power structures, and global conflicts. The film follows Gupta through the bustling streets of Mumbai—her eternal muse—and offers a behind-the-scenes look at her installations and performances showcased internationally in Paris and Lyon.