In the third gallery at Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai, you walk into a dimly-lit room with five suspended microphones. Instead of being listening devices, these mics have been transformed into speakers reciting poetry from across time and space—Hum Dekhenge by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, which has become a protest anthem in some Indian universities, a martyr’s song in Gondi, and a rendition of text by Nigerian poet-environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Titled Listening Air, this artwork by Shilpa Gupta carries forth the artist’s preoccupation with the spoken word and ways in which poets and writers transcend boundaries of what can and cannot be spoken.
Listening Air, which was shown at Bikaner House in Delhi recently, speaks of resistance and resilience, where words of Faiz, Ken Saro Wiva and others have travelled across generations, in different languages from Spanish, English, Cantonese and more. She combines text with sculpture and drawing to use language as a medium of resistance and justice.
Listening Air forms a part of Lines of Flight, Gupta’s first solo exhibition in West Asia, to be on view at the Ishara Art Foundation till 31 May. The show features a selection of works from 2006 to the present, including sound installations, site-specific interventions, sculptural works, drawings, prints, videos, and more. According to curator Sabih Ahmed, the exhibition foregrounds the artist’s longstanding critical engagement with narratives of mobility, emancipation and forms of control. It delves into the unique aspect of Gupta’s practice in the way she examines both visible geographical borders as well as invisible social and cultural borders in her work.
“For almost two decades, her work has raised questions around who draws these borders, for whom they are drawn, who is designated an insider and outsider, and who is allowed to cross them and who is not,” elaborates Ahmed. The exhibition brings together newer works with interactions of the older works such as A Liquid, The Mouth Froze (2018), featuring acast of a human mouth in gun metal, that looks at how poetry fares in the face of intolerance, and the Untitled (SmokeSeries) from 2016, which shows smoke hovering over interiors of a home or an office, questioning the binaries of the insider and the outsider. However, Ahmed points out that while the show encompasses works created over almost 20 years, it is by no means a survey exhibition or a mid-career retrospective. Neither are the works displayed in a chronological order. Rather, the show looks at questions that have been central to Gupta’s career— of belonging, exclusion, and poetic justice.
One can’t help but ask Gupta that when she sees all the works together, does she feel her own understanding of free expression, surveillance and acts of control has changed? “I have always been interested in thresholds—spaces where subjectives get played out and challenged,” she says. Some of the early works, such as Untitled, 1999—a wall piece comprising fabric pieces stained with menstrual blood collected from different women around her—looked at assumptions around gender. “And then repeated travels to border areas made me realise that when standing from the edges, the nation state looks very different when compared to when one is in the city centre—which is where I grew up. And that stories printed in history books and government records do not quite match the ones heard in person,” she elaborates.
Earlier works such as Someone Else, Altered Inheritances and the recent Listening Air look at how individuals lead their lives, negotiating the structures that they are surrounded by. Gupta’s practice is extremely fluid, with one work melting into one another. Those, who have witnessed the length and breadth of her career, would find germs of an idea for a new work in an older installation or drawing. Or she would have addressed the concept of resistance and censorship in a myriad ways in different phases of her career.
For instance, the 2011-work, Someone Else, started with a personal experience— of seeking escape from expectations. “That took me on a journey wherein I encountered stories of 100 writers from across centuries and geographies, who wrote under fake identities. From this project emerged accounts of censorship which as you know suddenly became a felt-reality around all of us. That led to For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, dedicated to one hundred imprisoned poets,” she says.
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The show also looks at the artist’s exploration of technologies of information through the use of flapboards. Usually used to display departures of trains and flights at stations and airports, in Gupta’s works, they relay broken words and phrases, which enter into dialogues with one another. She has used them effectively in the past too—at a solo show at the Barbican, London, in 2022, Gupta showcased a double flapboard featuring phrases such as, “When I disagree—I am ridiculed”, showcasing how truth becomes malleable in the hands of those who like to manipulate it. The same work, Still They Know Not What I Dream, has travelled to Ishara as well, and Gupta looks at how the pace of friction emerging from tech globalisation has increased significantly. “And we are facing opposing positions—the noise of which has become really shrill—that are pushing us backwards,” she adds.
Lines, literal and metaphorical, are of utmost significance to Gupta. In her artistic journey, she has discovered newer divisions, starting with gender and moving on to race and colour of the skin. As the world becomes even more fragmented, she is responding to these lines more deeply. “Growing up as a woman in South Asia, one becomes aware of lines early on—be it lines based on gender to visible and often invisible lines on the land, body or speech. Still where boundaries exist, methods to navigate and negotiate them inevitably emerge,” she elaborates. “While those in power seek to map, graph, draw lines and homogenise, people, when desperate, masquerade, catapult and move.”
The design of the exhibition is quite central to the way a viewer navigates the works. It almost feels like there is a journey from the interior worlds of an individual to the external, when it comes to one’s expression, freedom and sense of control. Ultimately, the viewer enters into solidarity with voices that have been silenced or have tried to resist control. Take, for instance, the first gallery, which features A Liquid, The Mouth Froze. Around it, one can see works from Untitled (Jailed Poet Drawings), featuring silhouettes of missing or imprisoned poets behind wooden frames—a reminder of the treatment of people, who use language as resistance. At the end of the gallery is a wall drawing in the shape of a flag made out of barrier tape, titled There is No Border Here. “The work is a reminder that flags which have stood for symbols of freedom are also the very instruments that limit it by means of social exclusion based on national belonging, ideology, caste, creed and race,” states the curatorial note.
The flag enters into a conversation with a video work, wherein sounds of nature from a rice field at the India-Bangladesh border are heard in the background as a volley ball game ensues between the residents and the Border Security Force. “It is titled, Is it Alright if we win?, based on a question asked by a dweller,” says Gupta.
The fourth gallery features a selection of works that explore the power structures along the above-mentioned border. The walls feature a set of six drawings made with codeine-based cough syrup, Phensedyl, which is legal in India but illegal in Bangladesh, and is traded across the border leading to widespread addiction. These are annotated by short texts that reveal the human dimension of this trade. Another set of line-drawings, titled Drawings Made in the Dark (2015), allude to the clandestine routes that link the two countries.
According to Ahmed, together the works explore the imaginary as well as concrete experiences of those who reside around borderlands. Those who are often considered a threat to national security are very often under threat themselves. “On the opposite wall is a work titled A0 – A5 (2014), created using thread and pencil on handwoven cloth from Phulia, an Indo-Bangladesh border town. Each frame is presented in a gradually ascending scale of standard paper sizes, and is inscribed with a ratio comparing the length of the line on the cloth with the length of the fenced border,” he explains. In this work, Gupta plays with the abstraction of state borders as they are represented on maps, miniaturised and devoid of social and environmental life. “However, while Shilpa presents the instrumentalisation of such abstractions by dominant powers, she also shows how people living in those regions find ways of producing counter abstractions,” concludes Ahmed.