Shilpa Gupta: Some suns fell off
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
February 15 - March 29, 2025
Over the last two and a half decades, Shilpa Gupta has developed a compelling interdisciplinary approach that challenges prevailing notions of individual and collective identity. Through sculpture, installation, sound, and drawing, Gupta explores concepts of nationalism, borderlands, control, and censorship. As regimes with authoritarian tendencies take hold around the world, concurrent with a tightly concentrated media landscape vulnerable to the influence of such power, the concepts of otherness, individual rights and the freedom of expression are especially resonant. Some suns fell off holds a mirror to the world, reflecting the invisible structures that restrict our freedoms.
Shilpa Gupta’s work often deals with the invisible lines that separate one from being legal to illegal in a few steps. Living in India, she frequently addresses the contested borders of her own country. Despite the fencing built along the demarcation line between India and Bangladesh, an informal and subversive economy persists across the border. 1:7690 is composed of a hand-wound ball of shredded strips of clothing carried from Bangladesh into India. The garment is no longer recognizable, a tactic often used in contraband. This conscious abstraction is further manifested in the artwork's title, which serves to underscore the arbitrary nature of state-sanctioned cartography. When multiplied by the ratio in the title, the length of the fabric strips corresponds to the measurement of the fenced border between the two nations. The act of winding and unwinding the ball again and again embodies the range of emotions – hysteria, anxiety, and hope – which vanish and reappear as lines are drawn through neighborhoods, and sometimes literally through homes.