In the multipart show ‘Sun at Night’ at London’s Barbican, Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta highlights the fragility of free expression and gives a voice to those silenced
All images: Shilpa Gupta: ’Sun at Night’, installation view, The Curve, Barbican Centre, until 6 February 2022. The words of Azerbaijani poet Mikayil Mushfig , labelled an enemy of the state by the Soviets, hover in the air. From a canopy of 100 low-hung microphones, a chorus clusters and repeats the poet’s statement. There is heavy breathing. Hums dissolve into whispers. Fingers click and hands furiously clap.
Once your senses adjust, you can edge through these spines that comprise Shilpa Gupta’s sound installation,. Rising up to waist height, the spears forge a constricted path. Each pierces a leaf of paper bearing fragments of the spoken verses, written by a poet incarcerated for their beliefs.
The enveloping piece is part of Gupta’s poignant exhibition ‘Sun at Night’ at the Barbican Curve. In a year when the Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to two journalists, Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia, for their courageous advocacy and practice of press freedom, and when digital censorship is alarmingly on the rise, the show is a testament to the force of words and the fragility of our commitment to free speech.
Come November 2021, Gupta will continue this dialogue with her first solo show at London’s Frith Street Gallery. ‘There will be spillover from the Barbican show,’ she explains, drawing a link between the genre of isolation that has been enforced throughout the world this last year. She has created a new flap-board – the kind typically associated with airport and train arrivals – that flickers through letters and settles to find our connective tissue.
In mbamtl's season opener curated by MaryDaileyDESMARAIS, ShilpaGUPTA's *For, in Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit*, acquired in 2019, is in thoughtful dialogue with works by Montreal artists in “How long does it take for one voice to reach another?' Recommended. EcoDecoArtAdvisor
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