Resistance and Resilience: New Works by Shilpa Gupta and Gauri Gill

The experience of viewing Shilpa Gupta, Vadehra Art Gallery’s latest solo exhibition of the artist at Bikaner House, confirms a singular truth: whatever is ‘real’ is an enigma, an illusion of strangeness, irrecognition, grotesquery; whatever is not an enigma, is not real, but an orchestra of control and subjugation, that affects both the individual and the collective. It is a performance that rouses the yin and yang of the State -- independence/jurisdiction, persistence/conformity, mobility/arrest, and perhaps most importantly, reward/punishment. Chasing such invisible structures becomes the underlying pursuit of the artist. This becomes rather dazzlingly visible in Gupta’s neon sign, “Thoughts from your head don’t let me sleep” (2024), one of the first art works that greets the viewer on the ground floor. The sign introduces an electrifying binary, a presence of two people, States, or states of being, that inform and challenge each other simultaneously. The poeticism, moreover, is hardly lost on the keen-eyed. Gupta’s interrogation takes place in an environment that is highly controlled (with manned entry and exit points regulating movement), censored (with a selection committee deciding upon the bookings for the venue), and surveilled (with CCTV cameras stalking every movement of the visitor). The interrogation brings to mind Jenny Holzer’s “Truisms.”

This is where Shilpa Gupta comes into its own -- in an impasse, a logical contradiction between the abstract and the tangible, with Gupta’s works remarking upon the ‘blind spots’ of the structures around us. (Blind spots that are inherently paradoxes. The distinction between reward and punishment, for instance, is a result of punishment itself, making the distinction a contradiction.) This is meditated upon by the stone, bulb and motor work, “Untitled” (2020), where a borderland river stone and light bulb dance in tandem, rising and falling one after the other. Gupta’s genius shines (literally) in the brief moment when the stone and the bulb pass each other -- an anticipation that sparks light over the grey surface of the stone, if only for a mere second -- before distancing from each other. It is in this vulnerable dialogue that the artist reflects upon balance, the flow of power, and the potential for destruction (a slight miscalculation, and the bulb would break against the rock). “StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream” (2021) conveys this tenuous feeling with sardonic regard. By repurposing an analogue flapboard -- an ‘official’ mode of communication for transit -- with cryptic phrases replete with intentional errors, Gupta instigates a conscious abstraction of what is otherwise precise knowledge. Often incoherent and unevenly spaced, the artist transports the viewer to a new epistemology, a new cartography of the human experience, that confronts this fragmented reality with “connective tissues to foreground the collective neuroses and affinities that bind society.” [1]

Gupta’s confrontation is ultimately with language, which becomes more palpable with the works presented on the first floor. “Listening Air” (2019-2023), the multi-channel sound installation, is sensorial as both an ode and a call to action. By bringing together recitations of “Bella Ciao,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Hum Dekhenge,” “No Nos Moverán,” and a rendition of a text by the Nigerian poet Ken Saro-Wiwa, the artist engineers the viewing room with upturned microphones that act as speakers. This symbolically severes the tongue of those who wish to speak, while simultaneously conducting a haunting recital of historically and presently incarcerated writers and their works. In this eerily harmonious dialectic rests the artist’s disposition towards challenging systems of erasures. A linguistic exile becomes beautifully harrowing in the Jailed Poets’ drawings (“Untitled,” 2018-ongoing), where imprisoned poets are outlined, yet made figuratively absent (ironically, making their absence more present). For Gupta, this is as much a creative exile as it is carceral -- a feeling that pervades the entire exhibition and all the works on display. While heroically subtle, Gupta’s disclosures are not short on bite, brooding upon newer imaginations of freedom in an increasingly ‘absolute’ world.

In another exhibition organized by Vadehra, Gauri Gill’s emphatic presentation of over 90 analogue photographs in The Village on the Highway obliquely teaches us a lesson in linguistics. Gill’s ‘village’ -- documenting an ingenious effort that uniquely repurposed farming machines into hospitable spaces -- invites the viewer to interrogate the ambiguous, equivocal and challenging definition of the word “resist.” Unlike words of ultimate negation (“dismiss” or “reject”), “resist” implies the tactful struggle mounted by the Indian farmers against the State in 2021, an inspired strategy of fighting the precarious with uncanny profundity. This is the precipice on which Gill trains her sympathetic eye, a cliff face of tarpaulin roofs and bamboo doors that greet the quizzical viewer at the Defence Colony gallery.

The photographs on display, detailing an inventive domesticity that surrounded the farmers protesting the deregulation of agriculture, have a disquieting stillness, that punctures our viewing with great unease. It is a wound that constantly reminds us that The Village on the Highway is, more than anything else, a site of conflict. In meditating upon the “unusual, handmade and homegrown architecture of resistance,” [2] Gill’s camera captures an obstinate will to stand for what is just. Braving an unforgiving winter, a scorching summer, and a dengue-festering monsoon, the Indian farmer transformed farming vehicles like tractors and trucks into makeshift homes, creating a space for entire communities (and astonishingly, even for the antagonistic police) to eat, sleep, bathe. Gill’s photographs highlight the borders of Delhi as protracted zones of a stalemate, with the tractors looking like siege engines. The archival print “Untitled (11)” captures the back of a tractor trailer covered with yellow tarpaulin sheets and a rugged blanket. An initial viewing of the photograph reveals the tractor as an imposing, brutalist machine of warfare, with its sharp edges and larger-than-life tyres. However, a closer look slips into our view the resting leg of a human being -- concealed, yet not hidden. Amidst the beastly roar of engines, Gill’s camera intimates the beauty of life worth fighting for.

A tenacious orderliness and dignified persistence are made visible in Gill’s vision, and “Untitled (5)” make these piercingly felt. In its methodical, near-staged composition, the viewer steps inside a large tent supported by bamboo beams and printed drapes, replete with a charpai (bed), standing fans, and the ubiquitous tractor (it is difficult to ignore the metaphor of thetractorasanumbilical cord connecting the farmer totheland/road). There is a clinical exactness to the image that makes “Untitled (5)” confusing and disconcerting; a cleanliness that sanitizes the neurosis of a carceral State that spent the major part of 2021 policing the farmers with metal barricades, armed patrols, bloody truncheons, water cannons and tear gas.

Gill’s intention is to capture the spirit of Chardi Kala, a Sikh tenet that seeks joy, optimism and resilience in the face of adversity. It is also associated with langar (communal food sharing) and and seva (selfless service), and is the recognition of hope, infallible. The exhibition, however, cannot be called so. In its ambitious scope, the display runs the risk of overwhelming (or even boring) the viewer, a risk that is not helped by the lack of textual anchors. Gill’s presentation is playfully unique, yet oddly remains incomplete because of the absence of a human voice. What we see is a story narrated by her camera. Where are the voices of the people that populated these sites of protest? For a subject that is decidedly human, this lack ultimately disjoints our engagement, making the presentation prone to exoticization.

Reservations aside, The Village on the Highway does triumph in its visuality and conceptual display design. Gill’s direction uniquely transforms the gallery space by using bamboo sticks, jute sacks, tarpaulin sheets and plywood as backdrops and skeletal structures, envisioning a stage that tries to replicate the intimately genius dwellings conceived by the farmers. It is an intimacy that was shared serendipitously -- or by unimaginable foresight -- with the bustle that filled the gallery space on the opening night, unwittingly creating a cramped, humid and difficult-to-manoeuvre environment, that transported the unassuming viewer inside Gill’s photographs; an experience that would be hard to replicate on an average day.

Shilpa Gupta, is on view at Bikaner House, New Delhi, from February 2 to February 14, 2025, and The Village on the Highway at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, from February 4 to March 4, 2025.

Shankar Tripathi is an arts writer, editor and curator based out of New Delhi.

Notes

[1] From Najrin Islam’s curatorial essay for Shilpa Gupta.

[2] From the press release for The Village on the Highway.