Gupta is interested in perception, and in the ways in which we transmit and understand information. Her mediums range from manipulated found objects to video, interactive computer-based installation, and performance. Her work often engages with television and its constant flow of meaning. Shifting the primary status of art from object-based commodity to participatory experience, Gupta creates situations that actively involve the viewer. Gupta is drawn to how objects, places, people, and experiences are defined, and asks how these definitions are played out through the processes of classification, restriction, censorship, and security. Her work communicates—across cultures—the impact of dominant forces acting on local and national communities, prompting a reevaluation of social identity and status. 

Shilpa Gupta works around the physical and ideological existence of boundaries, revealing their simultaneously arbitrary and repressive functions. Her practice draws on the interstitial zones between nation states, ethno-religious divides and structures of surveillance – between definitions of legal and illegal, belonging and isolation. Everyday situations are distilled into succinct conceptual gestures; as text, action, object and installation, through which Gupta addresses the imperceptible powers that dictate our lives as citizens or stateless individuals.

Shilpa Gupta has been interested in exploring the notions of location and belonging as against and within the complexities of national identities. Her preoccupations with research based practice has led her to work with a variety of mediums, from video and photograph to found objects, sculpture, performance and sound & light installations. Though her works she dismantles constructed notions of identity that is connected to equally abstract notions of nation, state, boundaries, citizenship, and delves into the contradictions and fissures that certain circumstances makes visible in these seemingly alright definitions. Through careful re- presentation of objects and narratives, Gupta subtly the frames through which the viewer encounters their subject, creating a larger paradigmatic shift in the process of viewing and meaning – making. Her recent work derives from her research around the multiple narratives emerging from the borderlands of India and Bangladesh. Using multiple narratives and tracing the historical violence embedded in living within the constructs of modern day nation-state, Shilpa creates artworks that create a room for speculation and reflection

Gupta is interested in human perception and how information, visible or invisible, is transmitted and internalized in everyday life. Constantly drawn to how objects are defined and how places, people, experiences are identified, Gupta explores zones where these definitions are played out, be it borderlines, labels or ideas of censorship and security.  Though overtly political, Gupta avoids sensationalism by parsing her subject matter through personal and private experience.  Indeed, her work engages the viewer with intimacy, dialogue and emotional intensity; direct but never didactic.

ARTICLE: Shilpa Gupta: the artist bringing silenced poets back to life

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