Shilpa Gupta, an Indian artist living a working in Mumbai, India discusses her work and the contemporary art market

Shilpa Gupta

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



As told to Reem Fekri

Gupta will be showing work at Art Dubai this year and is represented by Galleria Continua, Stand A28

“I studied sculpture at the Sir J J School of Art in Mumbai in 1997. In the past few years, there has been a new enthusiasm and interest in arts education both in terms of production and viewing of art. There have been efforts to look at art schools which have been stagnated due to state bureaucracy and also courses in art appreciation been set up... it is a beginning and there is a very long way to go…

Both the conceptual and aesthetic are interlinked in my artistic practice work. The work stems from living in an urban environment in the migrant city of Mumbai which has been experiencing rapid change. The aesthetics of my work are connected to the media that it is produced in, which is part of our everyday lives, electronics, internet, mechanization of action and also thought!

I have grown up and lived in migrant city of Mumbai, which has always celebrated its cosmopolitan nature in a country that has chosen a constitution that is secular. However in the past decade there has been a wave of right wing propaganda that has been slowly seeping into the minds of the people via various forms of media. I’m interested in the reasons for this change and so also the structures our society has created - religion, race, gender or even nationality and then the impossibility of these divisions.

For example, my recent work Tryst with Destiny, where a microphone, that is meant to be the disseminator of information, has in an act of distress and hysteria, stand solitary, singing to itself. As if there is no audience left and the dreams are too far away. It is the voice of the artist that comes out of the microphone, singing the iconic speech of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first President of India ‘Tryst with Destiny' on the day of Indian Independence, August 14,  in year 1947. He outlines a dream of equality, secularism and a bribery free nation. The artist's tone, varies and sometimes seems as if singing from memory, sometimes as if reading, sometimes forgetting, sometimes in great passion, sometimes moaning, sometimes in deep doubt and sometimes in great hope. In the background, hangs the speech printed out from 'Modern History Sourcebook' the font size so small that is makes it hard to read. Its 60 years since independence, the work is about the sense of loss, or a sense of a future that was once set out and we're now looking back, and wondering how far we went.

There is no such favorite work that I have produced, as such. Works that have been memorable in terms of public response have been In Our Times, which was an interactive shadow based video projection. Blame as well, the latter two being interactive. I remember selling Blame in Mumbai local trains where there were some quite animated intense discussions about the work.

There is one work that had produced few years ago using several touch screens, that I was unsatisfied with. And this I find annoying as the costs of installing the work is so much that am not able to easily show it

There seems to a definite interest in portraying the social and political circumstances in the East, as these are felt quite intensely. We live in very busy cities, where people come to from various different and often conflicting backgrounds and histories creating a very intense environment

I do not know if there is a total shift from the West to the East in the contemporary art market. There is a growing interest, which has moved from China to India to now Middle East which has been interlinked to the booming economics of these regions and not really evenly all over the East. What one hopes for that this is not just a passing fashion as that would also mean that it has to go out of fashion! At one hand the positive outcome is that there has been a new kind of energy and much needed support structures have been set up in a region but on the other hand too much commercialization has obviously been detrimental to the kind of art that is being produced.”

 

Photo Credits:

Shilpa Gupta, Untitled, 2008, Photograph on canvas 100 x 250 cm

 

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