Crossing Borders Because There Are No Borders Between You and Me
Shilpa Gupta. Untitled (There is No Border Here), 2006. Wall Drawing with Self Adhesive Tape, 118x118in. Photo courtesy of the artist and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.
Although her series of sculptures, sound and video works converse over fairly controversial issues in global politics, Gupta's objects are firstly elegant and beautiful. Do these aesthetics render her assertions unhelpfully oblique? Hardly. Suspended within deftly elegant installations, Gupta's observations on injustice are situated among other traits in the work. To believe that politics can be isolated from the overwhelming context of social stimuli in which they are integrated may have a 'book smart' appeal. And thank God for historians and political scientists who attempt to comb apart the complexities of human drama. In contrast, Gupta's exhibition is 'street smart,' espousing a conviction that such issues are only fully and accurately understood when experienced in the total bittersweetness of their interconnectedness with cultural aesthetics, formalist experiments and our sensual impressions of our own realities.
The first artwork one encounters upon entering the long gallery that houses A Bit Closer is a wall-based text piece. An image of a waving flag is traced out in yellow tape. Like caution tape at a crime scene, the yellow band is inscribed in bold type, a custom designed material that reads "There Is No Border Here." Stripes on the flag are interspersed with rows of text that starts off:
- I tried very hard to cut the sky in half, one for my lover and one for me.
- But the sky kept moving and clouds from his territory came into mine.
- ...I built a wall in the middle, but the sky started to flow through it.
All the while, the block of text is spelled out in the printed tape. This poetically narrated romantic episode is constructed out of the assertion that there is no border here. In shaping the characters and lines on the flag, the incessant phrase is fragmented by chance, so that the phrase mutates into other versions like "There Is No Border Her" or "Here Is No Border Here." Like the chancy experiments of Dadaists or the Lettrists, this thrumming subtext generates new meanings as it interacts with the graphic forms of the large paragraph.
Shilpa Gupta. Threat, 2009. Embossed body soap, Installed 18x12x42in. Each soap 6x2x1.5in. Photo by Scott Beseler, courtesy of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.
Halfway down the gallery, a work entitled Threat appears as a stack of bricks, like the foundation of a building or a sacrificial altar. The bricks are cast soap, tinted to the approximate hue of the artist's tan skin. Embossed deeply into each bar of soap is the word THREAT. Against the skin tone, they are suggestive of scarification and wounds. The smell is powerfully soapy; it builds as you near the work. Of all the works, this sculpture perhaps expresses what I surmise is Gupta's position among the world's unrests the most succinctly. The bars of soap are performative and can be imagined in use: the only way to remove the threat is to bring it close to your own skin and rub it into nonexistence. Opposition and intimacy meet in the simple gesture of these objects, and suddenly the overwhelming fears in the world are presented as a manageable stack that can be dealt with through patience and a willingness to be close to what is perceived as dangerous.
Although her exhibition is economical, distilled to a few important elements, the emotional breadth that Gupta's content traverses is impressive. A casually presented work, I Want To Live With No Fear, is a large, custom-designed white balloon across which the title of the work is scrawled. The work in the gallery is one remaining element from a larger interactive performance where visitors to the Contemporary Arts Center on February 21st received similar balloons and were invited to carry them out into the city (I saw one in my own neighborhood later that day). The dissemination of these balloons and their buoyant affirmations seemed well matched to pervasive pessimism, reluctance and divisive traits that can appear within our social consciousness in Cincinnati.
The final work in the space is a video projected down from the ceiling onto the gallery floor. Entitled Half Widows, this work requires patience if one feels it is important to make it through the whole video (which is fairly long for a work installed in a gallery rather than presented in a viewing or video festival). It is ultimately the most heartrending in its approach to presenting an issue of injustice. A game is enacted, where a solitary female (presumably the artist) hopscotches across cracks running all over a pavement, tossing small handfuls of stones across the ground that she then hops towards. Her progress is purgatorial, winding back across the broken terrain again and again. Her movements make her look crippled. The cold white light of the video catches in the space and lands on the floor, drawing our eyes down onto the almost vacant scene. The game is narrated in a sing-song rhythm with excerpts from testimonies by Kashmiri women whose husbands have gone missing. Whether adultery, political abduction or some unknown cause has drawn their husbands away, laws in Kashmir prevent abandoned women from remarrying or receiving support from the government. Their social and financial predicaments are echoed in the isolated figure and her seemingly endless game. The anxiety is palpable. Gupta's stakes in this political inequity are empathic; her practice as a conceptual artist finds her branching out, commenting poetically on issues that recall her own life experiences and the plights of a contemporary India. Her research and art demonstrates her assertions of there being no border, as she locates moments of similar or shared human experiences within different cultures.
Shilpa Gupta. Half Widows, 2006. Video projection, 14x11ft. Photo by Scott Beseler, courtesy of the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati.
Two other works in the exhibition were much more heavily reliant on technology, and because of such, encountered some technical difficulties during my many visits to the space. This is unfortunate, because they both dealt equally potent experiences as the works they accompanied. Maybe what can be learned here is that while Gupta's incorporation of current technologies brings even more relevant content about our current means of engagement into play, her gifts as a thinker and maker are hardly reliant on fancy special effects. No matter the medium, Gupta dispenses peaceable rationales and paced, simple gestures to draw viewers into an intimate conversation. Her work inspires a sense that you and she are very close. In stirring such a sense of boundless, sincere connection, Gupta is not just aiming to get close to her audience, rather the potential of the work is to spread that sense of interconnectedness throughout the global community to which we all belong.
