Drawing Room: Why Payal Arya loves Shilpa Gupta’s artworks

Shilpa Gupta’s work maps our collective imagination. It confronts the viewer with questions of nationhood, identity, and belonging

Shilpa Gupta adapts her modes of working to fit each new work. One well-known piece For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017 – 18), is a sound installation honouring the works of 100 historically and presently incarcerated writers. One hundred metal spikes each have a sheet of paper pierced through them. Each sheet bears an excerpt of a poem by a writer, and the year they were detained. A microphone and speaker are suspended above each spike, playing a recording of each poet’s work. While walking through the installation, one is engulfed in the voices of the poets, sometimes as singular whispers and in moments as a collective onslaught.

In 100 Hand Drawn Maps of My Country, Shilpa Gupta asked people to draw their nation’s maps from memory.

Gupta superimposes the 100 drawings to create a composite, such as this map of Italy.

For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017 – 18) is Gupta’s tribute to writers who were or are incarcerated.

Payal Arya loves the questions of identity and belonging that Gupta’s works provoke.