Photo Credit: 54°/Felix König
Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta interrogates the conditions under which speech is permitted, constrained or silenced. Working across sculpture, drawing, installation, video, public interventions and books, she addresses political persecution, border violence, religious nationalism and the lived consequences of military occupation. Language in Gupta’s work is never neutral or abstract; it appears as something embodied, fractured and precarious, shaped by power rather than freely available to all. In her new exhibition What Still Holds at the Hamburger Bahnhof, selected works are placed in dialogue with those of Joseph Beuys, whose ideas of voice, participation and social responsibility are reframed through Gupta’s uncompromising attention to censorship and the material risks of speaking in the present.
We speak with Gupta leading up to her new exhibition about truth, censorship and the weight of words.
Your new exhibition, What Still Holds, is part of the 30th anniversary of the Hamburger Bahnhof, and your work will be shown alongside select works by Joseph Beuys. How did that come about?
I think the curators were interested in how we both use language and think about ideas of universality. Beuys is such an iconic artist, whose work the audiences here will be long familiar with, and here I am, an artist from South Asia, where my works are shaped by my own context – by navigating borders of looking and being. It will be intriguing to see how people in Germany will respond to it.
‘TRUTH’, photo credit: Ela Bialkowska
The monumental letters of your sculpture ‘TRUTH’ will loom over the exhibition. The letters are so big that visitors are forced to walk around them. What’s the idea behind the work?
I think we’re living through a moment when we don’t quite know what to trust anymore. Through social media, the lives we’re living – rather, performing – online, the concept of truth is falling apart. The media now sits almost under the skin. Its intimacy and speed make meaning slippery and volatile. It feels very different from five years ago – more unpredictable, and what someone says today might not hold tomorrow. That’s why the scale of the letters matters. Their brokenness rises above you. You’re grappling around it, searching for it, but it keeps going further away. We’re constantly building structures around ourselves, but they’re crumbling at the same time.
It was recently announced that Trump’s administration in the US had abandoned Calibri in favour of Times New Roman to “restore professionalism” – a symbolic return to bureaucratic authority that mirrors ‘TRUTH’s serifed typeface…
Yes. It couldn’t be Helvetica or Arial – it had to be Times. That font references a certain kind of power, a certain history, an official status. Having spent time in border regions in the north and east of India, the gap between what the state wants us to know and what people want to say or how they want to live their lives has stayed with me. Who gets to tell history? Who gets to speak? I have always been interested in the act of writing.
‘Untitled’, photo credit: Pat Verbruggen
The exhibition arrives at a time when truth is increasingly manufactured by those in power – a tendency especially evident in India under Narendra Modi and in Donald Trump’s United States…
Power is aware of history, so history books in India are targets and the libraries of our minds are being raided. These are things that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, but they’re happening right in front of us. The rise of authoritarianism is global. The right seems acutely aware of and interested in culture, and their potential to shape people’s imaginations. For example, in China, there’s enormous attention paid to what gets shown. There seems to be an entire governmental department that’s interested in art exhibitions, and its officials even visit shows before the actual openings.
Have you encountered censorship yourself?
Not really. I tend to show what I want to show. Recently at the Macao Biennale, just one day before the opening, my works were pulled out and that felt rather disturbing, as the entire piece was removed. It was very difficult; the curator had worked extremely hard, and I was working long distance, so all of us had invested a lot of time and effort.
‘StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream’, photo credit: Pat Verbruggen
For which artworks?
It’s a series I’ve been working on since 2016, called Nothing Will Go On Record, based on tracings of voices that speak up. You see two or three figures in uniform that surround it, and the speaker or protester is rendered in the negative. For the last Macao Biennale, the tracings were engraved on school desks. Visitors are invited to place a piece of paper over the surface and make a rubbing with a pencil or crayon before taking the paper away. The work was meant to be shown across 25 desks arranged like a classroom, but then the last image I have, all those desks were covered up! That’s the last time I saw the work. It’s sad, because when you make a work, you’re waiting for people to interact with it, to respond, to complete it in some way. In Berlin, three desks from that series will be included in this exhibition alongside other works that also engage with acts of seeing, knowing and control.
So a work about erasure ends up being erased…
Yes, and the work continues. I’ve traced images from many different places, across time and geography. One might be from India, another from elsewhere. There’s also material from the US, including the George Floyd incident. I don’t spell it out, because right now things are so close to home that people can read into it themselves.
A lot of your work foregrounds writers and poets. Where does that focus come from?
We’re living through a moment when we don’t quite know what to trust anymore.
From deeply personal reasons. Around 2010, during a wave of international ‘India shows’, I found myself being narrowly categorised as a South Asian, Indian, woman and new media artist. This led to Someone Else, a work based on writers who used pseudonyms or anonymity. While researching it, I discovered that Munshi Premchand, who I first heard about from my mother as a child and is one of my favourite authors, had changed his name after his books were banned under British colonial rule. By 2015-16, censorship and threats to speech intensified and filmmakers began returning awards to protest the growing intolerance. Speech felt fragile, like glass – something that could break at any moment. This urgency shaped my work, For In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit, which in turn led to ‘Listening Air’, a piece that embodies the people behind inherited words and songs and how language is passed between generations and held onto for survival.
Photo Credit: Belen de Benito
‘Listening Air’ will be in the exhibition, as will the sculpture ‘A Liquid the Mouth Froze’, which provides a more literal, brutal response to stopping speech and controlling the imagination…
Yes, it’s a cast of the inside of a mouth. A liquid is forced in and freezes. It’s about suddenness: the realisation that while we thought the world was opening outward, it’s actually closing in. Doors and windows are shutting. In South Asia we sensed this change earlier; now others are feeling it, too.
Your work often treats borders as things that can be measured, fenced and mapped, yet remain fundamentally unstable. What initially drew you to this contradiction?
We’re living through a moment when we don’t quite know what to trust anymore.
I think, growing up in South Asia as a woman, the concept of a border is something that you’re constantly negotiating. When I was in art school in the 1990s, there were separatist riots and bombings in Bombay, so borders, both visible and invisible, were part of daily life. Chance later took me to Kashmir. I remember looking at data published by the Ministry of Home Affairs, and which led to ‘1:14.9’. It’s a work made up of 79.5 miles of hand-wound thread, which is a ratio equivalent to the length of 1,188.5 miles of fenced border between India and Pakistan in the west/north-west. Whereas in the east, 82% of the India-Bangladesh border is fenced, but the illegal trade there is three times the legal trade. It’s a very porous border. Here, the state is rescaled by its own representatives who choose what they want to see. That stayed with me.
A lot of my earlier works were also about the act of looking: about beauty, naming and what’s considered permissible. I remember sitting on the staircase outside of a temple because I wasn’t allowed to enter, while all my school friends could. Perhaps being a woman contributes to becoming a listener.
You couldn’t enter because you were a woman?
No, because I was menstruating.
Another work in the exhibition, ‘Still they know not what I dream’, uses words on LED displays to move between the personal and the public, the intimate and the structural. Can you describe how it works?
I’ve been working on that series since 2008, using flapboards and text that I write over time. It might begin with something private and then slowly expand. Let me read some: “Is there something you would like to say… I look into your eyes, to be inside of you, to be what you’ve been, what I once was, what I once had, what I once felt and lost.” It sounds interpersonal, but it’s also about larger structures – about a state, or power, or authority – and about greed. About how nothing is ever enough. You don’t just want your own piece, you want the next piece and your neighbour’s piece. Really, it’s a work that needs to be experienced rather than explained: “You name to hold, to mould. You name to tame. You name to claim. You name to blame. You name to restrain.” So the work asks what naming does. How much of naming is about identification, and how much is about control? Why do we name? Who gets included, who gets excluded? Naming has elasticity: a kind of slipperiness that we find ourselves constantly negotiating.
‘Someone Else Library’, photo credit: Anil Rane
Does incorporating language so directly allow you to engage more personally?
A lot of the text comes from the unconscious. So yes, it’s highly personal, but I think all work is personal. There’s also craft. Once you experience the text, it shifts quickly, moving from one thing to another, from the inwards to the outwards, into the many worlds we inhabit and are constantly negotiating. In that sense, it’s really about how we speak.
The work ‘Tower of Broken Pencil Points’ consists of a fragile tower of pencil leads stacked on top of each other. Despite its vulnerability, it speaks of the impossibility of destroying an idea…
You don’t know when things will change, but you continue anyway. You rebuild the tower again and again because there’s no other option. It’s not just for poets. It’s for all of us. The impulse to act is bigger than yourself. You follow it.
To what end?
Well, making art is itself an act of hope. Writing is an act of hope. You continue to read, I continue to make work. But the act itself is always the first step.
What Still Holds, Through Jan 3, Hamburger Bahnhof, details.
