The Brooklyn Rail

A bodiless voice emanates from a microphone in a room lit by a single lightbulb. The voice states the names of 100 poets across time and space followed by the year they were detained or incarcerated by their state. A reverse-wired microphone renders an uncanny switch in communication; the microphone is unusable to the viewer. The speaker’s words are unshakeable, and the once-censored names now exist, quite literally, on the record. In Shilpa Gupta’s Untitled (2023), she utilizes the reverse-engineered microphone as a tool to make her audience listen and wonder what has been left unsaid. Throughout Gupta’s exhibition, spread across two spaces at Amant, the invisible takes up more space than the visible, highlighting the ways in which political censorship erases individual expression.

For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2023) is a memorial to a history of censorship. A mix of gun metal-casted books and wooden books fill four shelves. Light bulbs on long black wires snake through the shelves, giving the work a soft and welcoming glow. From afar, the books look leather-bound, ready to be picked up and read. As the viewer approaches, the gun metal casts glisten and the wooden books flatten, revealing only the impression of pages that cannot be turned. The façade of knowledge leaves the viewer with only the text on the covers. The book titles state the name of a poet imprisoned due to their writings, the title of their publication, and the date. We are left with untold stories, another reminder of the importance of the unsaid.

In Altered Inheritances - 100 (Last Name) Stories (2012-2014), fragmented images create jigsawed stories of identity. Horizontally-cut frames build on each other, creating a disjointed collage of images. No image is complete; photos blend with maps and snippets of scenery. An open mouth is cut in half and placed in between the sea. In each grouping of frames, written and typed anecdotes from across the globe explain the loss or gain of a last name. From Gaelic immigrants who changed their names to avoid English colonist ostracism and freed slaves changing their names to “Freedman,” to actor Nicholas Cage dropping “Coppola” from his last name, and the creation of a star named “Elton John” (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight), the short stories illustrate the complicated nature of belonging. We see how something as flexible (and often arbitrary) as a name can be the difference between control and liberation, in both the personal and the political. The space between the disjointed frames creates a timeline of visual richness that is integral to the full picture, just as dislocation is integral to the individual.

Viewers are invited to take a wax-casted star from a pile on the floor in Stars on Flags of the World (2012/2023). Created to equal the artist’s body volume, Gupta’s stars are carefully traced to represent stars that appear on the flags of recognized and unrecognized countries. The stars are a representation of Gupta’s body (her body volume) disseminated into a new form; her body disappears into the national symbol of the star. The fragile stars are easily snapped into pieces, inflexible yet breakable, just like the border line of a country.

In Gupta’s older work Speaking Wall (2009–2010), viewers walk on a line of bricks to a small screen. Once equipped with headphones, the viewer is told to take steps backward and forward by a disembodied voice whose words are also projected on a screen. The ominous voice tells the viewer whether they are on the invisible border line. In one instance, the border is shifted a few centimeters away by the wind. In another, the border line is washed away by rain. The viewer’s only knowledge of the border comes from an omnipotent voice; the border is imagined between the voice and the viewer.

Colonial entities have imposed violence in the name of borders throughout human history, erasing art, poetry, and individual expression from official records. Gupta’s ability to unearth the invisible is a super power that is all too relevant to our global political and social discourses. In Gupta’s works, the untold story of the individual triumphs. The difficulty of lack of nuance in our systems of authority is not only questioned but imploded. Freedom takes its roots in the imagined spaces of poetry and individual expression.

These worlds can illuminate a secret life of invisible maps and strings that hold us together, that bring our humanity out of the nationalistic mechanisms that try so hard to erase us.