Shilpa Gupta, “Some Suns Fell Off” / David S. Rubin
- Democracy Chain
- Mar 17
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 21
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, California
Continuing through March 29, 2025
March 15, 2025
In this deeply thoughtful exhibition, Mumbai artist Shilpa Gupta explores a topic that has become even timelier since the election of Donald Trump to a second term: the fragility and instability of national borders. When Gupta invited 100 people to draw maps of the United States from memory in a small sketchbook, who could have imagined that a U.S. President would soon be advocating for expanding those geographical boundaries? In her installation “100 Hand-drawn Maps of USA” (2023), Gupta presents the sketchbook on a table and activates the pages with air blown from a nearby fan so that they flutter slightly. The glimpses we see reveal that not a single participant was able to create an accurate representation, many of them remarkably skewed. To elucidate further on the observation that memory edits out details, even for as ubiquitous an image as the shape of the United States, Gupta produced sculptural works like “Map Tracing #8,” which is made of copper pipe and slightly twisted. Although it looks pretty much like the U.S. silhouette when approached head on, the sculpture changes shape as we walk around it.
In another work, Gupta looks at border conflicts on a personal level. Displayed in a vitrine with a plaque, like the trophy from a sporting event or a 1980s Jeff Koons sculpture, the simple object in “1:7690” (2023) is actually constructed like a ball of string made from shredded strips of clothing that were smuggled from Bangladesh into the artist’s native India. This is where the demarcation line between the two countries is contested and sealed off. When the length of the fabric is multiplied by the ratio in the work’s title, the resultant dimension corresponds to the physical span of the border’s fencing.
“Stars on Flags of the World, July 2011,” a large-scale wall tapestry, cleverly represents most of the world through the superimposition of star patterns lifted from the flags of several officially recognized, as well as unrecognized, nations in 2011. Gupta embroidered the stars such that they appear to overlap and obscure one another. By leaving the threads exposed and dangling, the artist calls attention to global insecurities, such as political turmoil or climate change. Conceptually, the work recalls Yukinori Yanagi’s early-1990’s “World Flag Ant Farm” installations, where the artist made ant farms replicating the flags of different countries and joined them together in a grid with actual ants living in them and making trails in the designs.
Crossing borders often involves transportation systems such as trains, boats, and planes, so to raise questions about migration, Gupta turned to a communications format common to all of these modes of travel, a motion flapboard. “SOUND ON MY SKIN” (2025) is her latest such installation, where viewers may sit and watch as words flip before us. Only, rather than present information about arrival and departure times or destinations, the board displays a stream-of-consciousness poem about truth and power, fear, and hatred. Many of the words are deliberately misspelled, a tactic intended to make us think twice about our perceptions.
The most poignant offerings in the exhibition are five drawings and an installation that center on the suffering of those who have been victimized in their efforts to flee their homeland for a better life, or simply to exercise free speech. The delicate drawings from “Untitled (From Nothing will go on Record Series)” (2016/2023) may be quiet in temperament but they really stick with you. In each, Gupta depicts protestors being arrested by police or military. Only the outlines of the victims’ bodies are rendered, with the absence of their features signifying the silencing of their voices.
In an adjacent gallery, the global history of censorship, specifically the muzzling of some of the world’s most creative and inspired voices, is the subject of an untitled installation that pays tribute to 100 poets from various countries and time periods, who were detained, incarcerated, disappeared, or executed for their ideas. In a darkened space, viewers stand before a table with a sheet of paper listing the poets’ names and the years they were targeted. Overhead, we are encircled by the movement of a single illuminated light bulb and a reverse-wired microphone that plays a recording of a female voice reciting the poets’ respective names, dates, and countries. The atmosphere feels solemn, almost sacred, with the light bulb recalling the late Christian Boltanski’s Holocaust memorial works.
Although Gupta assumes a global perspective, the show is particularly relevant in terms of the present moment in the U.S.A. To her credit, the artist’s approach — which is at once clever and poetic — can seduce us away from our avoidance of tough subjects. Her exhibition is an important reminder that, in the most stressful of times, we can always turn to art to nurture our wounded souls.
David S. Rubin is a Los Angeles-based curator, writer, and artist. As a curator, he has held positions at MOCA Cleveland, Phoenix Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and San Antonio Museum of Art. As a writer he has contributed to Art and Cake, Art in America, Arts Magazine, Artweek, ArtScene, Artillery, Fabrik, Glasstire, Hyperallergic, and Visual Art Source. He has published numerous exhibition catalogs, and his curatorial archives are housed in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.
For more information: www.davidsrubin.com.
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