BY CSMI STAFF WRITER

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.

Shilpa Gupta’s work engages with the defining power of social and psychological borders on public life. Her work makes visible the aporias and incommensurabilities in the emerging national public sphere in India, which include gender and class barriers, religious differences, the power of repressive state apparatuses, and the seductions of social homogeneity and deceptive ideas of public consensus enabled by emerging mediascapes. Her works make obvious the invisible threads that bind various factions of society together, often sensorially challenging her audience to occupy subject-positions of the ‘other’, even if temporarily, to initiate an empathetic understanding. Her works jolt their viewers out of a complacent, assumed, objective distance from the theatre of politics, to show that we are all complicit in the mechanisms of large apparatuses of power.

She has had solo shows at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Arnhem, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz and Arnolfini in Bristol and has participated in biennales in Venice, Berlin, Kochi, Lyon, Gwangju, Havana, Yokohama, Liverpool amongst others. Her work has been shown in Moma, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, Devi Art Foundation, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Mori Museum. Her work is in the collection of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Mori Museum, M+ Museum, Louisiana Museum, Daimler Chrysler, Louis Vitton Foundation, Astrup Fearnley Museum, KOC Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, FRAC  (France Regional Art Collection), Cincinnati Art Museum, Kiran Nadar Museum amongst others. In 2021, she will have solo shows at Muhka in Antwerp, Barbican in London and at Dallas Contemporary.

Her work is in the collection of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, Mori Museum, M+ Museum, Louisiana Museum, Deutsche Bank, Daimler Chrysler, Bristol Art Museum, Caixa Foundation, Louis Vitton Foundation, Asia Society, Astrup Fearnley Museum, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain – France, KOC Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Queensland Art Gallery, FRAC  (France Regional Art Collection), Art Now, Cincinnati Art Museum, Kiran Nadar Museum and Devi Art Foundation amongst others.