"I Live Under Your Sky Too" is a moving presentation of recent work by Shilpa Gupta (Mumbai, 1976) where voice and poetry fill the exhibition space reclaiming the existence of people who have been muted, isolated or relegated to the edges. As embodied by the animated LED light installation with the exhibition´s title phrase – written in English, Spanish and Urdu – this exhibition (presetend at Centro Botin, until September 8, 2024) stages a clear assertion of presence. Shilpa’s insistence on filling empty spaces with voices from diverse communities in a huge variety of languages is a natural consequence of her life in Mumbai, in an extraordinary multicultural and polyphonic environment, immersed in a sea of languages, religions, cultures and beliefs.

"The exhibition "I Feel You" (March 8–July 14, 2024, PinchukArtCentre) invites the viewer to listen to experiences, memories, and testimonies from different places around the world, including Ukraine. Landscapes emerge, carrying scars of human tragedy while bearing the seeds of hope. Unsilenceable voices sound free and loud, despite the repression of authoritarian regimes. Human anxieties and utopian dreams are eclipsed by the political manipulations that affect reality today. The exhibition presents works by many artists, including Shilpa Gupta."

“The ground slips between us” (Workshop by Shilpa Gupta in collaboration with Renata Cervetto, March 11-16, 2024. Fundación Botín) is a workshop that encourages the sharing of practices and experiences in art and education based on the work of the artist Shilpa Gupta. The workshop invites artists, curators, cultural agents and mediators working within institutions or community projects to rethink their current processes and challenges based on the themes and methodologies that traverse the artist’s work. Topics such as strategies of creative resilience in the face of censorship and repression; the ideological and geopolitical barriers that cross our bodies and systems of thought-action-mobility; and imagination and radical listening as tools of resistance and community building will be exercised by contemplating the working contexts of the people participating in the workshop.

“I am intrigued by how we look, register, remember and what we see—in the gaps and fractures between the image, eye and the invisible nerve endings which retain and transform it over time. I am interested in visibility and invisibility; notions of reality, truth and definitions; in sound, silence and silencing and in the possibilities of listening.” In her own words this is indeed the inspiration for Shilpa Gupta. As an Indian artist of international repute, she has been a significant part of the Art movement in the UAE, an enabler in the confluence of South Asian & Middle Eastern Art. She will keep inspiring the younger generations in the times to come.

Edited by the artist Shilpa Gupta and the writer Salil Tripathi, the anthology borrows its haunting title from a medieval Azeribaijani poet, Imadeddin Nesimi, invoking the many dimensions of the incarcerated imagination. At the same time, the book’s stark subtitle – “Encounters with Prison” – suggests the brutality of imprisonment. Traversing diverse mediums and genres – poetry, illustrations, sculptures, installation photographs, self-accounts, interviews, reports – the book offers a multi-sensory window into prison experience. It includes short profiles and the works of over 60 poets and writers who cover many aspects of imprisonment, as well as of exile. 

“I was walking on the street. A car stopped, a few men stepped out, and pushed into my mouth, a liquid. The mouth froze.” Those haunting words open two New York shows devoted to Shilpa Gupta, a Mumbai-based artist who has taken over Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea as well as Amant, a non-profit space in Brooklyn (October 27 - December 16 2023). Meanwhile, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2023) fills a room with vitrines displaying sculptural casts (in gunmetal, again) of books by incarcered poets bearing titles such as We Can’t Hear Ourselves, No One Hears Us and Two Silences Made a Voice. That notion of a voice made by silence is one that Gupta seems to both appreciate and abhor, and her work is all the better for the tension between the political stakes it engages and the personal resilience it memorializes. Gupta refuses the idea of silence as an absolute state, and shows how voices persist in defiance of forces that might suppress them.

Gupta has created the commissioned artwork We Change Each Other (2023) for Noor Riyadh, in Saudi Arabia. We Change Each Other is a monumental light installation whose text appears in various languages including Arabic, English and Hindi. This play on languages translates Gupta’s questioning of unity and amalgamation of cultures in a world where various human beings come into contact with each other. We Change Each Other reflects the artist’s interest in flux within interpersonal spaces, whether it be intergenerational or shaped by religion, politics or gender. By interweaving local languages in a poetic fashion, Gupta highlights the hegemonic power of language, its historical past and mutations.

Shilpa Gupta’s “I did not tell you what I saw, but only what I dreamt” is on view at Amant Gallery through April 28; her eponymous exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is on through December 16. This tittle is taken from the last lines of Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko’s 1845 poem “A Dream.” In a recent interview, Shilpa Gupta describes how “poets, like writers and artists, are dreamers who speak of the nightmares of the living world. This work is about the persistence of beliefs, of dreams, which make us into what we are as individuals.” Her newly commissioned installation at Amant, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017/23), ingeniously captures the disruptive potential of a form too often considered politically inert in the Anglo-American world. That poets may hold tools to effect social change is suggested, somewhat paradoxically, in their regular suppression and censorship.

In her new exhibition (‘I did not tell you what I saw, but only what I dreamt’ is on view at Amant, New York until 28 April 2024)  Shilpa Gupta commemorates the verse of poets censured by governments through sculpture and installations."The most minimalist of Gupta’s works on this theme is A Liquid, the Mouth Froze (2018), a small cast-gunmetal sculpture of the inside of a mouth that arrests, even fossilizes, speech. A text displayed vertically beside the cast reads: ‘I was walking on the street. A car stopped, a few men stepped out, and pushed into my mouth a liquid. The mouth froze.’ The piece seems to embody the punishing trade-off poets have often had to make: freedom of expression bought at the precious cost of personal liberty or even life itself. In works old and new throughout the survey, Gupta elevates universal, humanistic desires that have insisted on finding ways to subvert and overspill state power.

'How is it that all the countries tell their citizens they are the best?' Shilpa Gupta asks, quoting a line from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. It's a question that relates to her practice. Divided into competing nationalities, how can we all share the same space and engage in dialogue? Over a cup of tea, Gupta shared motivations behind her work and how she hopes audiences will engage with her mini survey exhibition, I did not tell you what I saw, but only what I dreamt (21 October 2023–28 April 2024) at Amant, New York.

Shilpa Gupta, the subject of two new shows in New York this fall — including her first solo exhibition with the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, on view in New York from October 27th to December 16th, 2023. — describes her way of working using a common Indian word, “jugaad.” Adopted over the past decade in the West by productivity gurus and business schools, the practice of jugaad means finding innovative solutions with limited resources, bending senseless rules and skirting rigid bureaucracies — getting things done without setting off alarms. “That famous word, jugaad, it’s really real in India,” she said. “You have to constantly take risks to be able to do anything.”