Shilpa Gupta Selected Press
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
Selected Press 2013
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
23/08/2016
shilpa gupta
Articulating everyday phenomenon: The distance of a shout Shai Venkatraman / Creative: Amna Iqbal, The Express Tribune, August 18, 2013
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Shilpa Gupta Artists and the ri art, First C ity Magazine , Ne w De lhi, June , 2013
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Indian Artist Highlights the Absurdities of Our Time - NYTimes.com
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"Stars on Flags of the World" by Shilpa Gupta, a pile of hundreds of steel stars representing those found on national flags. By GAYATRI RANGACHARI SHAH Published: June 11, 2013 MOST EMAILED
MUMBAI — “Will we ever be able to mark enough?” the Indian contemporary artist Shilpa Gupta asks in the title of her current exhibition in Innsbruck, Austria. The artist, who is showing several pieces at Art Basel in Switzerland this week, certainly appears to be making her own imprint.
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At 36, the pixie-faced Ms. Gupta is one of India’s best known and most prolific contemporary artists, and three different galleries are displaying her work at the Art Basel fair, which opens Thursday.
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The Paris gallery Y von Lambert is showing “Untitled,” a multimedia work made this year that juxtaposes a photograph of a Kolkata traffic light with an old-fashioned microphone and a song called “Call of the Y oung,” consisting of sounds of the street and traffic. The work explores how something as quotidian as a traffic light can be appropriated by the state for political mileage.
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“It’s strange how the state needs to assert itself,” Ms. Gupta http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/arts/Indian-Artist-Highlights-the-Absurdities-of-Our-Time.html?_r=0
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said in an interview at her studio in a suburb of Mumbai, adding that it was even the case “in a noisy public place where people are distracted and may not pay attention.”
Anil Rane/Chemould Prescott Road Gallery
"1:14.9," a ball of thread symbolizing the part of the border betw een India and Pakistan that has been fenced.
The Mumbai-based Chemould Prescott Road gallery is showing in Basel “Stars on Flags of the World,” a 2012 work that includes hundreds of stainless steel stars representing those found on national flags. The stars, traced, carved and piled atop one another, represent the fluidity of borders and the appropriation of communities that have been around longer than the nations in which they reside.
And Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv is displaying “2652-1,” an installation that represents the number of steps the artist took between Al Aksa Mosque, the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. For that work, Ms. Gupta pulled together small photographs that she took while walking between the three holy sites, resulting in a thin 42-meter, or 138-foot, canvas that evokes both the proximity and the vast schism between Islam, Christianity and Judaism. These works all showcase what Ms. Gupta is perhaps best known for: her exploration of nationhood, identity, religion and the human condition. “I am interested in the role and purpose of art,” she said. “Shilpa’s practice addresses intriguing and difficult subjects through lighthearted yet critical observations,” June Y ap, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New Y ork, said in an e-mail. Ms. Y ap worked on the exhibition “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia,” which ended May 22 and included Ms. Gupta’s work “1:14.9,” a handbound ball of thread symbolizing the 1,907 kilometers, or 1,185 miles, of the border between India and Pakistan that have been fenced. The title is the ratio of the length of the thread (79.5 miles) to the length of fenced border. “There’s an elegance and sophistication of thought, and she’s deeply interested in the aesthetic,” Shireen Gandhy of the Chemould Prescott Road gallery said of Ms. Gupta. “Shilpa navigates and gets down to the core of an idea.”
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הלבשה תחתונה- b144 כל חנויות ההלבשה התחתונה כאן, באתרb144 - !עכשיו בלחיצת כפתור
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Among the works on display through July 28 in the “Will we ever be able to mark enough?” exhibition in Innsbruck — which previously traveled to Canada, the Netherlands and Belgium — is “Threat,” a work made of a wall of soap designed to look like individual bricks, with the word “threat” written across each one. By employing an impermanent material like soap to evoke objects as long-lasting as bricks, Ms. Gupta seeks to push viewers to question their own assumptions about the world. It has already been a banner year for Ms. Gupta. In the first half of 2013 alone, she has been featured in various group shows at places including the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in England, the Singapore Art Museum, the Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, the Guggenheim in New Y ork and the Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates. A group show at the Faurschou Foundation in Copenhagen runs through Friday. Since her time as a student at the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Arts in Mumbai, Ms. Gupta’s concerns have leaned toward the differences between human perception and reality and the ways current events shape peoples’ lives. “Her practice engages in the very real and present politics of our existence,” said Ms. Y ap of the Guggenheim. “This engagement infuses her works, but the works are not necessarily ‘political’ representations.” Ms. Gupta also shies away from calling her art political, preferring to refer to her works as “everyday art” because they are a direct response to her daily observations, including on current events. “I don’t like the term political because it’s just another category,” she said. “I am interested in the absurdity of large-scale group-making practices and what human beings do with that.”
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Ms. Gupta acknowledges that she constantly explores what happens when a viewer observes her work. “I have to try to understand what the emotion is that is being created,” she said. “Because of my background in technology and having been in the world of graphics, I think there’s something there that makes you more conscious, more aware of how people will react.” 1
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A version of this special report appeared in print on June 12, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune. SAVE
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Interview with Shilpa Gupta Quddus Mirza , ArtNow Magazine, May, 2013
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'I Live Under Your SkyToo' Sanjuk ta Sharm a , Live , Mint, 23 Fe bruary, 2013
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Shilpa Gupta writes Across Night Sky Noelle Bodick, ArtsAsiaPacific Magazine Online, 22 February 2013
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Selected Press 2012
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
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Apocalypse art Ramya Sarma, The Crest Edition, Times of India, Mumbai, 17 November, 2012
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Rhizome | Embedded Structures: An Interview with Shilpa Gupta
Embedded Structures: An Interview with Shilpa Gupta Yin Ho | Wed Jun 20th, 2012 9:25 a.m.
Untitled, photograph, 2006
Turner Road, photographs with sound, 2008
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Rhizome | Embedded Structures: An Interview with Shilpa Gupta
Untitled, MS Gate which swings side to side and breaks the walls, 2009
Shilpa Gupta's work sometimes takes place outside of or leaves the gallery, and ranges from photographs and objects to websites and interactive video. I spoke with the Mumbai-based artist over email: Your pieces often weaponize subjects, drawing awareness to an underlying violence or militarization of mundane acts and objects (e.g., the tedium of house guards in Mumbai, a child with multiple arms making a gun with their fingers, a mechanical swinging gate). Could you expand on what you consider to be the political in the everyday? What I am referring to are the embedded and often invisible structures that steer the way we think in daily life. Example: while we read newspapers and watch the 9 pm national news, it slips off our mind that the images we are seeing could be filtered in certain ways to generate certain opinions. Example: on the Untitled, MS Gate which swings from left to right and breaks the wall, there is an undefined form which, while much smaller in size, is far deeper than the rest of the gate. This could be an undefined geographical territory or it could be a hole in a brain of a housewife, both of which may have a desire to be free.
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Rhizome | Embedded Structures: An Interview with Shilpa Gupta
There is no explosive in this, interactive installation and photographs, 2007
There is a strong sense of place in your work alongside a sense that what you're conveying could be anywhere (I'm thinking of There is no explosive in this, in particular). Other pieces bring specific historical moments into focus, such as the speeches made by Nehru in Singing Microphones, a photograph of a landscape in search in Looking for Kurukshetra (the site of the battle in the Mahabharata), or in searching for soldiers in footage of the Kashmir landscape. How important is your location and background to exploring concepts in your work? What I am interested is in the ways of looking into people’s imaginations. Sometimes one zooms in and sometimes one zooms out. Therefore, in different contexts, histories and methods unfold in different ways.
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Rhizome | Embedded Structures: An Interview with Shilpa Gupta
Singlng Cloud, thousands of microphones, 2008-9
There is no border here, self-adhesive tape, 2005-6
Pieces like Singing Cloud and Untitled (There is no border here) include text in the form of song or prose, respectively. How do you work with text? Are there particular qualities or sentiments of writing that you wish to highlight? I work quite instinctively with text so there is nothing pre-planned. Though I do know the endform of the text — if it will be a wall drawing or will become an audio piece. It is not that I have a text with me, and then plan what http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/jun/20/interview-shilpa-gupta/
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the form will be. Both are integrated from the start. blessed-bandwith.net, a Tate net art commission from 2003, and some of your other earlier sites of digital work have expired. Was this intentional? Does your work differ when you shift from physical to digital media? Does the preservation of digital art concern you? What happened with Blessed bandwidth is that I had bought the web space for a certain number of years, five or seven (can't remember!). Then one day I got an email, asking me to extend it or not. I simply chose the second option. I felt it had lived a life and been online for a rather long time and had several visitors so it was ok to not extend it. There are then other physical works which also change, example: the Threat soaps become pale; I want to live with no Fear balloons deflate at some point; several outdoor photos tear. One is aware that several works can be temporary, which is how many things in life are also. What’s more interesting for me is the encounter, or the possible moment of exchange which is mostly always brief and always just a memory in the end.
Threat, bathing soaps, 2008-9
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I want to live with no fear, printed balloons, 2010
Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them? I had enrolled myself into computer studies in high school. So in the beginning, it was studying the Basic language and programming. My art school taught traditional sculpture, so I attended several after-hours computer courses in little classes outside and learnt various graphic andanimation software. Later on, I studied web design. I have always been fascinated with logic driver programmes and the way they enter our lives which may not be all that logical. What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology? While I use a lot of technology with sensor-based works and interactive video projections, I also use materials like soap, or even cellotape! I'm not particularly attracted to ‘high-tech’, and in fact, not quite comfortable when sometimes an elevated position is bestowed upon that new media. Various components become part of my work: a soap, a bag, brick, speakers, computers, audio, text, video, sensors, light, cellotape, etched metal plates, etc., which are all part of daily life. I'm interested in the distributive, interactive, and sensory aspects of technology, but I also offer viewers soap with "THREAT" embossed on it to take away from the gallery. Tags: interview Shilpa Gupta
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Shilpa Gupta at A rnolfini R owan Le ar, this is tom orrow, C onte m porary Art Magazine , 18 April 2012
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Shilpa Gupta R onald Jone s, Frie ze Magazine , Issue 146, April 2012
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Metallic library, books ablaze — Gupta shows art needs to be free De e panjana Pal, ArtBe at, The Sunday Guardian, Fe bruary 15 2012
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Selected Press 2011
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
23/08/2016
Shilpa Gupta: A Cutting Edge
Shilpa Gupta: A Cutting Edge Featureby
Leon TanLinear conceptions of time could make us think about cutting edge as some aspect that moves
radically away from the existing norms and systems. But cutting edge could be an incision on the social fabric that helps the deterritorialisation of concepts, notions and events, says Leon Tan, citing the works of Shilpa Gupta.The expression ‘at the cutting edge’ frequently means to be adorned in the ‘latest’ fashion, equipped with the ‘newest’ technological device and attuned to the most ‘current’ knowledge. However, by the time something has been publicly identified as cutting edge, it is usually already sliding rapidly away from an edge. ‘New media’ was at one point considered the cutting edge of art. Nowadays, the combination of words makes some of us uncomfortable, not least the artist whose work this brief essay, discusses Shilpa Gupta. In an interview this August, Gupta had this to say on the matter:
I am not so comfortable with the word ‘new media’ for a couple of reasons. One, it sounds a bit fashionable, and two, it’s also an emphasis on the ‘avantgarde’ or the new, and to say that the old is obsolete, which is actually never true, history is very important.It probably does sound fashionable, just as ‘relational aesthetics’ also sounds fashionable among certain private and public art institutions. The more important point Gupta makes, however, is one worth thinking through in detail. To say that something is new is almost invariably also to say that something else is old, passé or irrelevant. Such a habit of thinking comes attached to a linear concept of time in which the past is succeeded by the present. If new media consists of art built on the latest technologies, a linear concept of time is problematic because it implies that artistic practices in different parts of the world in which access to such technologies is limited are somehow outofdate, behind the times so to speak. Is this really the case? It also implies that these practices cannot possibly be at the cutting edge, the vanguard of experimentation. Does this seem plausible? Since the long duration of human history provides evidence that different populations in every age had their own technologies, why should we over emphasise the ‘new’ technologies of this era, and in particular, a set of digital technologies originating from the U.S. and Europe, as a kind of radical break in history?
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On the other hand, there is another concept of time, through which a different understanding of what ‘cutting edge’ means is possible. If the present does not succeed the past, but emerges from the past so as to coexist with it, we would have a situation of multiple coexisting times or durations. A person might consist of a duration of eighty years, a city, a duration of a thousand years, and a species, on average, a duration of two million years. Using Manuel DeLanda’s (2006) ‘new philosophy of society,’1 we can call durations ‘assemblages,’ that is to say, open wholes composed of more or less heterogeneous parts that are at once individual and social. Every assemblage is always caught up in at least two tendencies, one a tendency towards territorialisation, which results in the assemblage’s consistency and identity over time, and another, a tendency towards deterritorialisation, which results in an erosion of the assemblage’s consistency and identity.
Within this framework, a cutting edge may be conceived as a blade slicing through an assemblage, opening it up to transformation. A cutting edge is a vector of deterritorialisation within a social whole, causing relations among component parts of that whole to come undone. It is in this sense that Shilpa Gupta as an artistic practice is a cutting edge (rather than Gupta the artist ‘being at the cutting edge’ simply by virtue of her engagement with a range of ‘new media’ technologies). When in the work Blame (20022004) she hawked bottles of artificial blood (labelled ‘blaming you makes me feel so good…’) in Mumbai trains, asking passengers to identify different bottles by race and religion, she made visible invisible tensions and tendenciestoviolence within the habitual social patterns of everyday life in the city. A Mumbai assemblage was sliced open to outside forces, to unpredictability, uncertainty and anxiety, its ‘stability’ and identity (as a crowded but relatively ‘safe’ train journey) momentarily threatened with erosion. In There is No Explosive in This (2007), bagcovers carrying the title text were distributed to visitors to be taken out into London streets. Much http://www.artnewsnviews.com/viewarticle.php?article=shilpaguptaacuttingedge&iid=28&articleid=753
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like the blame bottles, this work also effected momentary threats to ritual public interactions and the social stability such interactions contribute to, making palpable the existence and circulation of currents of fear and anxiety associated with the possibility of ‘terrorist’ attacks.
In the work Threat (2009), Gupta presented an installation of soap bars impressed with the word ‘threat’ and stacked into the shape of a wall. Threat was not sold to visitors but given away, each visitor being invited to take a bar of soap home. While the gifting of the bars literally reduced the wall of Threat, the use of Threat soap in everyday life resulted of course in the erasure of the word itself. What stands out in this work, and more widely in the artist’s preference for working directly in public as well as in public (statefunded) art institutions, is the gifting to the public that replaces the economy of sales characteristic of private dealer galleries. Such a practice comes out of a commitment to making work, or even working for, a variety of publics and not just the elites of socalled art worlds. This aspect of Gupta’s practice is another cutting edge of sorts, a vector of deterritorialisation running counter to a prevailing tendency to reduce all values to financial or monetary value.
This is not to say that Gupta’s works are never ‘sold,’ some have ultimately been acquired by both private and public institutions. The fact that Gupta’s works are collected should not, however, detract from the dynamics of gifting she http://www.artnewsnviews.com/viewarticle.php?article=shilpaguptaacuttingedge&iid=28&articleid=753
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introduces into the complex relations between artists, institutions and publics. Bear in mind, the artist has to make a living too. What is significant is that she describes some of her work as ‘distributive media,’ for distribution, especially widespread public distribution or diffusion through gifting, literally deterritorialises the capitalist logic of accumulation and concentration. Having said all this, recipients of Gupta’s gifts should never forget what Marcel Mauss taught us about gift economics, ‘The taonga or its hau – itself a kind of individual – constrains a series of users to return some kind of taonga of their own, some property or merchandise or labor…’2. For some at least, what is asked in return is a kind of affective labor, at times an engagement with wounds in desire that cause us to close ourselves off to the world and its unpredictability.Reference1. Manuel DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (New York: Continuum).2. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen & West Ltd., 1966), p. 910. Taonga is a Maori term for something treasured, whether tangible or intangible, while hau refers to its spirit.
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Shilpa Gupta R e think ing C onte m porary Art and Multicultural Education, Part II: O n Artists, Ne w Muse um , Pg 103-105 & Pg 254, 2011
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Contested Territories: The A rt of Shilpa Gupta Avni Doshi, Art Fair Magazine , C ove r Stoy, Vol. 1, Issue 2, Pg 26-30, 2011
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Selected Press 2010
41-41 : שבת, שישי,44-44 :'ה-' ג,1111441-11 פקס,2111111-11 'טל,2411116 תל אביב, 11144 .ד. ת,41 ראשית חכמה 14 Reshit Hochma St., PO Box 35411 Tel Aviv 6135302, Tel: 03-6043003 Fax: 03-5444893,
[email protected], www.dvirgallery.com
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Shilpa Gupta: 2,652 Steps in Jerusalem Sm adar She ffi, Haare tz Ne wspape r He bre w Ne wspape r, English Translation, May 21 2010
A refined exhibition by Indian artist Shilpa Gupta highlights the absurdity of the bloody inter-religious conflict. An exhibition by Shilpa Gupta, currently on show at Dvir Gallery in Nitzana st., Jaffa, is among those small exhibitions that are a veritable jewel. Precision, restraint, elegance and insight set it apart from so many other exhibitions where a modesty of means fails to cover-up the lack of justification for showing what little that is shown. With five works consisting of drawing, photo-objects and projected slides Gupta tells a story, muses on the fleeting and ephemeral and ties together different times. Conceptually, this refined exhibition is a kind of meta-drawing, an extraction of motion, sound and feeling into concrete form. Its title, 2,652, echoes a famous piece by John Cage, 4.33 (which runs 4 minutes and 33 seconds). The piece, written for any instrument, instructs the performer not to play his instrument throughout its entire duration. And although the instruments remain silent, the piece is actually about the time elapsed and the sounds of the environment, often a concert hall. The connection between Cage and the work of Gupta, who was born in 1976 and lives and works in Mumbai, is not so far-fetched is it first may seem, considering the deep influence that far-eastern cultures, and Indian philosophers in particular, had on the composer. The number 2,652 designates the number of footsteps the artist had walked between the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Western Wall and the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem – three holy sites described in the short text accompanying the exhibition as having “a history of dialogue and conflict”. But although there have been times of dialogue, it is conflict that has dominated their shared history. In linking them by way of her footsteps – a very humane and understated measure – the artist has highlighted the nearabsurdity of the bloody conflict between the three faiths (as those between their various inner subdivisions). This linkage is refracted against the actual short distance between their incarnations as measured by the footsteps of one woman. Walking is related to pilgrimage, which is practiced in all three religions – as in many others. In essence, pilgrimage is a physical journey in pursuit of spiritual revelation, and in this respect it may resemble art, inasmuch as art is the attempt to carve in matter the realization of a longing, a message, and possibly a spiritual presence. This walking or triangular pilgrimage performed by Gupta is also a reference to tourism, the modern reincarnation of pilgrimage, and later of the exploration of foreign territories – the two chief causes for migration up until modernity. The work 2,652-1 is assembled of small photographs of people walking, no doubt randomly and inadvertently captured by the camera. The photographs are printed on a thin strap of canvas, only 4 centimeters wide and 42 meters long, in what resembles a linear contact sheet of an old, overly elongated photographic film. With film, the photographic output is arrived at by exposing light-sensitive chemicals; Gupta in turn sensitizes her viewers, compelling them to come nearer to the photographs, examine them, recall their own way of walking and perhaps consider the nature of walking as a cultural practice. I The theme of walking, strolling and wandering occupied many thinkers – from Baudelaire, whose flâneur roams the city, to Walter Benjamin, who 80 years later portrayed the urban wanderer as a phenomenon of the modern age (Benjamin’s own unfinished projects stemmed from his strolls through the streets of Paris). These two inquisitive standpoints, of the tourist-explorer and of modernity, are ingrained in Gupta’s work. From her contact sheet-canvas Gupta formed a kind of triptych – the outlines of three towers rising up while excess film lies scattered on the floor, its imagery of seekers, wanderers and ramblers curled-up and tangled. Those towers, like ghost-towers of the other city of Jerusalem, which houses no holy sites, also echo the Christian holy trinity, a spiritual concept that bore an influence – surely from the aesthetic point of view – on the two other monotheistic faiths, namely medieval Judaism and Islam. 100 Hand drawn Maps is a video projected on a canvas that has been stretched on a light conic object the general shape of an altar. Here Gupta embarks her viewers on a journey between the playful and the melancholic, between what is intensely familiar to local viewers – Israel’s map – and abstract shapes. http://shilpagupta.com/about/bibio/2010/haaretz.htm
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Images closely resembling the map change repeatedly, with the lines encircling the occupied territories – those enclaves that are due to various war situations – constantly changing, their lines dissolving and stretching, jumping like an abstract dancer in an arabesque position. The stream of consciousness conveyed in the drawings acquires a kind of near-religious halo, like a light emanating from above and under the altar, which is a kind of light box. Gupta offers here countless options for reading both the geographic and spiritual locus. Where might we travel in the imagination, on the spiritual stairway, so asks the viewer as he observes these transformations, this chain of visual syncopations that Gupta draws with only few lines that become a map, and later frame everything that might have been, but isn’t. back
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