Ishara Art Foundation
Lines of Flight is Shilpa Gupta’s first solo exhibition in West Asia. Featuring a diverse selection of artworks from 2006 to the present that include a new sound installation, site-specific interventions, sculptures, drawings, prints and videos, the exhibition foregrounds Gupta’s longstanding critical engagement with narratives of mobility, control and acts of resilience.
Over the last two and a half decades, Shilpa Gupta’s interdisciplinary art practice has challenged how individual and collective identities are perceived, governed and orchestrated by the state and societal forces. Her work questions how people, places, everyday objects and languages get recast through nationality, gender and economic relations. By focusing on moments of unrest, Gupta’s work encourages viewers to participate in imagining a new poetics of resistance.
Lines have occupied an important place in Gupta’s art practice since the beginning of her career. Her work has frequently examined how modern systems of power and control depend on linear forms. From drawing national borders to declaring one’s ancestry through bloodlines and surnames, lines become the single most effective tool for political and social organisation. Gupta’s work plays with such concrete and symbolic lines, subverting them through the friction of everyday encounters between the individual, the community and the state.
The exhibition brings together Gupta’s exploration of technologies of information. Flap-boards used for displaying train departure times relay broken words and phrases; documents used in administrative offices become haikus of witness testimonies; and microphones used for public announcements conceal speakers that convey voices of poets incarcerated for their beliefs. Each work in the exhibition demands a closer look, a deeper listening, to realise how every apparatus that tries to enforce limits is always transcended, and how every line that creates boundaries is surpassed by another line of new horizons.
Shilpa Gupta: Lines of Flight celebrates the practice of a contemporary artist who is deeply committed to voices of emancipation that transcend borders, imposed silences and conventions. The exhibition is curated by Sabih Ahmed, Director of the Ishara Art Foundation, and will be accompanied by physical and virtual tours, as well as educational and public programmes.
Artworks for the exhibition have been loaned from the Art Jameel Collection, Pooja Jhaver and the Ishara Art Foundation and the Prabhakar Collection.
The exhibition has been generously supported by Carl F. Bucherer, with insurance support from Emirates Insurance Company, and logistical support from Galleria Continua, neugerriemschneider, and Vadehra Art Gallery.
About the Artist:
Shilpa Gupta (b.1976) lives and works in Mumbai, India where she has studied sculpture at the Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts from 1992 to 1997.
She has had solo shows at the Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati, Arnolfini in Bristol, OK in Linz, Museum Arnhem, Voorlinden Museum and Gardens in Wassenaar, KIOSK in Ghent, Barbican in London, Dallas Contemporary and the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, Bielefelder Kunstverein, La synagogue de Delme Contemporary Art Centre and Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi. In 2021 she had a survey show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp curated by Nav Haq. She presented a solo project at ‘My East is Your West’, a two-person joint India-Pakistan exhibition, by the Gujral Foundation in Venice in 2015.
Gupta’s work has been shown in leading international institutions and museums such as Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Serpentine Galleries, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Mori Art Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ZKM, Ishara Art Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Devi Art Foundation.
Shilpa Gupta has participated in 58th Venice Biennale (2019) curated by Ralph Rugoff, Kochi Muziris Biennale (2018) curated by Anita Dube, Göteborg Biennial (2017) curated by Nav Haq, Berlin Biennale (2014) curated by Juan Gaitán, New Museum Triennial (2009), Sharjah Biennial curated by Yuko Hasegawa (2013), Lyon Biennale curated by Hou Hanru (2009), Gwangju Biennale directed by Okwui Enwezor and curated by Ranjit Hoskote (2008), Yokohama Triennale curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (2008) and Liverpool Biennial curated by Gerardo Mosquera and Manray Hsu (2006).
Her work is in the collections of the Tate, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Centre Pompidou, Mori Art Museum, M+ Museum, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Deutsche Bank, Daimler Chrysler, Louis Vuitton Foundation, ZKM, Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Fonds national d’art contemporain, Fonds régionaux d’art contemporain, KOC Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Canada, Museum Voorlinden, Art Now, Cincinnati Art Museum, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Art Jameel, Devi Art Foundation, and the Ishara Art Foundation and the Prabhakar Collection, among others.