Personal vision of an artist who seeks public participation

Shilpa Gupta is very methodical in her approach. She often spends months laboring over the elaborate logistics and the whole process of creating it. Apart from humdrum mechanics like connecting wires and screwing on those electrical contraptions, the artist indulges in some bizarrely arduous, even gimmicky processes like going into an operation theatre and recording a kidney transplant (Kidney Supermarket).

Once her research and the meticulous production process is over, the artist seeks your participation. She demands the philistine gaze. Bandwidth, an online installation by her, was a virtual space you log on to, to receive blessings. In fact, most works have been spontaneous expressions of the role of gender, religion and violence in shaping our perceptions.

She started began as an artist in her early 20s, after completing her graduation from Sir JJ School of Art. After her first solo in 1999 at Chemould Gallery, she received more fame internationally than at home, with shows of her works in France, Holland, at Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Italy, at the DaimlerChrysler Gallery in Berlin, and several state museums as well as public art spaces across Europe. Of course, collectors and art institutions in India did finally take notice of her achievements.

As is evident, majority of her artworks reflect an earnest and deliberate engagement with the basic purpose of art. According to the artist, ‘The aesthetics is the process.’ In fact, she is more interested in (knowing) what her art can say and convey, as well as what it can provoke in the viewers not necessarily art lovers. Through, her life size video installation, entitled ‘Shadows II’, Shilpa Gupta urges people to look at themselves differently, in the contemporary context. It was also publicly displayed at the promenade in western Mumbai. “The public space is what I make art for,” she asserts.

Importantly, elite collectors and buyers appreciate this aspect of her works, which is why they have gone to a series of auctions the world over and from part of several renowned collections. In creating a world as her ambition, she helps us to manage the necessary labor in looking at and measuring a strategic globalization based on disruption, rather than focusing on a crisis state where consumerism seems to be the only measurable form of change.