WheredoIendandyoubegin: Shilpa Gupta's Art of Encounter, Engagement, and Embodiment (original) (raw)

2021, Shilpa Gupta: Drawing in the Dark. Hatje Cantz., 2021.

A few years after the Kargil War of 1999 between India and Pakistan, a curious exchange occurred among artists from the two countries. They sent each other artworks across the border to be displayed on the other side. Despite tense relations since being violently cut into two imagined political communities during the partition of India and Pakistan, immaterial ties among families and shared histories-unbound to passports-linger. Aar Paar (initiated in 1999) 1 is a project that was built from artworks that were mostly digitally transferred and printed across a heavily guarded border. Laden with subversive intent, surpassing surveillance and checkposts, these artworks lend objecthood to a desire for solidarity among physically dispersed communities, and the material journey of the artworks traced a channel of trans-individual social relations. 2 Shilpa Gupta has been consistently preoccupied with condensing immaterial relations between different communities-social, political, and contingent 3-in her practice. Sentiment Express (2001) was a portal where one could dictate personal letters, which were sent over the Internet from several time zones across the world to be handwritten in Mumbai, as a comment on the rise of outsourcing labor to India from the West. The project encouraged those who were transcribing the letters to slip in their own additions to what was dictated, as a critique 3 Grant Kester has identified the contingency of randomly constituted communities that develop and dissolve around an artwork in public space. For more, see Grant H. Kester, "Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art," Afterimage 22 (1995). 2 First proposed by Louis Althusser, the trans-individual space of human relations becomes the foundational idea for Nicolas Bourriaud's seminal book Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du réel, 1998). A similar concept is identified as "trans-subjective" space in Griselda Pollock's work. 1 The edition of Aar Paar referred to here took place in 2002. The first edition in 1999 was conceived in collaboration with the artist Huma Mulji. Artists from both nations were invited to display their work along the streets of Mumbai and Karachi.