Interview with Shilpa Gupta

By Dr Simon Maidment, Associate Director, Art Museums, The University Of Melbourne

This text was originally published in NGV Triennial 2017, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017.

SIMON MAIDMENT: You are a leading artist from and based in India, and your work is highly sophisticated on the question of Indian identity. It could be read as being distinct from your being Indian; it operates very successfully outside a presentation in that context. However, there are critical aspects in your practice that I think are very much informed by where you are in the world and your lived experience.

A key idea you often interrogate in your work is the sense of belonging, of who one’s community is. It touches on the question of ‘Which country am I from or in; where do it fit in?’

SHILPA GUPTA: You are right that people tend to perceive each other through their geographical location; however, that would be just a partial image, as there are several other alignments that shape our worlds. For example, certain groups living in big cities, even if they are several thousand kilometres away from each other, would have more in common with each today other than those living a few hundred kilometres away. Or to cite another example, when I was showing the work There is no border here, 2005–06, which has emerged from my experiences in Kashmir and, in Havana, the response was overwhelming and far more emotional than what I received even in my own city. Does that make me a Cuban or a Kashmiri? In the interactive installation Speaking Wall, 2010, there is a line that says:

Is the place you come from,
The place you grew up
Or the place you belong
Mentally
Physically
Emotionally
Philosophically

The oldest nation state is barely a few hundred years old, whereas cultural, social and language overlaps stretch further and continue to spill and trespass into each other’s spaces irrespective of lines drawn on paper. And then these, too, are ruptured by everyday life, where access and desires, even on the same street, are far from even.

SM: It is not drawing a long bow to consider the influence of partition on the centrality of these ideas to your work, and the subsequent events that affected the lives of your parents and grandparents, and which have shaped your city and India itself. Borders have been a source of fieldwork and elaboration in many works you have made; there is especially the sense of the arbitrary nature of them in tension with the concrete results of being on one side or another, of crossing borders and negotiating them in some way.

The work in the NGV Triennial, Untitled, 2012–2015, is one of a number where you have used the found object of the microphone – a device with a diaphragm that vibrates with the passage of air, something that can act to either record sound or emit it – as a small speaker. In each of these works you have combined poetic text you’ve written with sonic elements to create a composition that seems to belie the solid mass of the object – a shifting soundscape that is altogether more ethereal. The text in the sound element of the work Untitled, I believe, reads:

We look forward towards our past
To the edge of the sea
Waters sink
Oceans flood
Oceans flood
A folded boat rises

SG: I have always been interested in the relationship between the organic and the constructed, where the very act of construction allows for mediation. This space where agency operates echoes intent, but can also hold stories of slippages between what is created, imagined and learnt and what might stand apart from what may be desired in corners. Who stands up, who speaks the loudest and who draws out and labels the world for whom?

Another aspect that continues to follow me is the act of movement, which is one of the first things we did as human beings – we stood up and we walked. And since then we continue to move and change each other. However, recent history, which is overarchingly imagined by nation-state borders, and braced with symbols such as flags and the national song, reinforces a uniform identity, as though such markings, which are primarily drawn up in lined registers, have always been around, which is not quite the case.

The text piece looks at migration, which is impossible to rein in. Birds fly from one hemisphere to another in search of resources, even though border posts are erected and reinforced. The dreamers and, most often, the desperate continue to leave home to embark on a long journey to the elsewhere. The audio that is layered upon with sounds of the waters calls upon the impossibility of restricting the flows of people, where the ocean, in distress, floods itself, and offers a boat to move upon and cross over to a new shore, where there is some hope.

SM: You incorporate text a good deal in your sculptural work – usually texts that you have written. Could you tell me about your process for writing? Are they phrases that come to you in interstitial moments that you capture, or are they a result of time spent working at your desk, for instance? Do they initiate or shape the projects they find their way into, or do they come as a result of a sculpture or object?

SG: The text in my work, like most other elements, arises out of its own workings, so much so that sometimes I think, since I am the only one in the room, therefore it had to be me writing it! I feel the process of art-making lies in the space between the conscious and unconscious, where thoughts and questions swim and collide and find a brief resolve. It is hard to say at which point the text arrives, as there are times a text has been sitting for more than a year before having found a form, or sometimes it comes midway through the work.

SM: The scale of Untitled is (even) larger than that of previous sculptures where you have used the microphone, and in this case it sits on the ground, like a rock, instead of being suspended, like a cloud. How do you read this work differently from others you have made? How is its form, and hulking scale, related specifically to the text that emanates from it?

SG: The work, which is shaped like a gigantic rock, was conceived in 2013, and I think what has shaped its form have been concerns around climate, where nature is beginning to respond to the onslaught of human intervention that would like to control and get the masses to conform. There is not much space left for listening to the voices of those outside the power hierarchies. The form of the rock represents solidified voices, which form a chorus, ready to hurl themselves forward into, and [merge] with, the ocean.