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. 

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.