Shilpa Gupta: "Since the very beginning, my practice has engaged with perception, deception, and misinformation." | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

How has Mumbai influenced your artistic practice?

I grew up in quiet, mixed suburbs with several temples, churches, and mosques. Starting art school in the ominous years of 1992-1993 left a deep impact. On the one hand was the unbelievable frenzy following liberalisation and on the other hand was the city torn apart by sectarian riots. 

On my daily commute by train to the city centre, I would sit staring at the gigantic billboards telling us how to live, that seemed to have sprung up almost overnight. I often work with text in my works—the impulse emerged from these encounters with advertisements and the coded, absurd and instructional messages they carry. 

The train appeared in Untitled (1996), where I suspended a long row of train handles from the ceiling of a room. The work is about the suspended body performing the everyday, negotiating movement and safety. 

I took my work Blame (2002) to the local train again in the form of an interactive performance. Blame consisted of bottles of simulated blood. Their label said, “I blame you for what you cannot control. Your religion. Your nationality.” 

In Notice Board—A Letter to the Housing Society (2009), a text-based work, I wrote a complaint about blood leaking into my walls, both from the flat upstairs and the flat below. The address carried a street with two names, in a city that continues to move between two names—Bombay and Mumbai. 

The plurality of my neighbourhood inspired the outdoor light installation, I live under your sky too / Hum bhi aapke aasman ke niche rehte hai (2004), with interwoven text in English, Hindi and Urdu. 

Your installations take a minimalist approach while exploring contested ideas of nation-making and borders. Can you comment? 

These works are about the slow persistence of the individual vis-à-vis the larger structures that surround us—structures hinged to power, playing games and manipulating in order to remain in power. 

The India-Bangladesh border series, Drawing in the Dark, emerges from the experience of everyday life that must go on, often in the dark, in the shadow of a manmade fence across a border that divides. But borders also join. The same can be said of We Change Each Other, where interwoven texts in English, Hindi, and Urdu float against the horizon of a city that has, must, and continues to move together. Within that movement, our lives endure.

In “Listening Air”, songs from different protest sites play in a room. Do you see protest as a universal language despite its local specificities?

In “Listening Air”, songs from different eras and geographies circulate in the gallery space. They move across different languages, much like the light installation, We Change Each Other. Here, not knowing one language becomes a part of knowing—an acknowledgement of the presence of the other. The work is about singing together and seeking strength in forms of art at a time when governments are losing the patience to listen to those who challenge them.

From “Listening Air” by Shilpa Gupta. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Language, spoken, written, or sung, appears throughout your oeuvre as a tool of resistance. What power does words hold when they are censored, banned, and tweaked?

In 100 Hand-drawn Maps of My Country, none of the maps matches. For Someone Else, 100 writers, some very well-known today, took on fake names to publish books. For Altered Inheritances, 100 people changed their surnames. These works led to the sound installation, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, based on 100 poets who have been incarcerated. All these works acknowledge the individual who finds ways to negotiate societal or state expectations and impositions, even when language itself is increasingly under watch. The attempt to contain language reveals the fragility of power, its eagerness to manipulate who gets to speak and how.

Blame by Shilpa Gupta. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit has had multiple iterations in the form of a sound installation, book and drawings, which makes it accessible to a variety of audiences. Was it a conscious decision to present the work in diverse forms?

I often move across mediums. Blame started as a poster to later become a bottle, a sticker, even an interactive performance. While making the sound installation, For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, I found it impossible to let go of the many stories of incarcerated poets. That is how the drawings emerged. The book had existed as a drafted proposal even before showing the sound installation happened. It took several years to fundraise, find a publisher, and make it all come together! The book was a way to honour the poets—to translate and share their stories and words. Even when regimes held their bodies, their words continued to flow. 

Truth by Shilpa Gupta. | Photo Credit: By special arrangement

Many of your works invite the participation of viewers. Why?

It is all about how meaning is made and held together. 

The ongoing exhibition, "we last met in the mirror", is your first show in Germany. How does it bring together your three-decade-long practice?

The title, “we last met in the mirror", is about the self, in reflection, confronting its own limits. Much of our actions emerge from the unconscious. Since the very beginnings, my practice has engaged with perception, deception, and misinformation—how knowing is partial and contingent, and how meaning is not given but negotiated. “we last met in the mirror"is about the friction between knowledge and power, between language and image, between truth and appearance and agency.