If words can survive, what use are prisons?

As I write this, isolated in my comfortable apartment in Delhi in the killing heat of summer, several images from the world ‘outside’ make their way into my consciousness. Hundreds of people, despair writ large on their faces, begging for air - for oxygen. Bodies of the dead washing up on the shore

I’m interested in perception and with how definitions get stretched or trespassed: Shilpa Gupta

Originally published in The Indian Express on 17th January, 2016

Neither India nor Pakistan has a permanent pavilion in Venice. Do you see the joint presentation at Venice as an opportunity for artists from the subcontinent to enter into a dialogue?

In the absence of any

The Artist and the Dangers of the Everyday: Medium, Perception and Meaning in Shilpa Gupta’s work

Published art etc. news and views, March 2011

Gupta's scepticism towards definitions and their unbearable weight did not surprise me. Her uneasiness in front of the uncompromisingly synthetic and limiting character of categories was easily expected. For expressions such as “new media art”,

My East is Your West

A satellite exhibition of the 56^th Venice Biennale, My East is Your West was presented at the Palazzo Benzon, whose interior architecture of adjoining rooms, narrow corridors and cordoned-off, dimly-lit spaces suggested a mise en abyme of thresholds and crossings. Commissioned by the

Stars and strikes ... the imagination of an artist

One is, of course, historically, indebted to and dependent upon European thought, as it is indispensable in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations. However, it remains inadequate as a model for systems which remain completely out of its reach. Instead