Shilpa Gupta

With her installation relying purely on light, the Indian artist Shilpa Gupta flashes a truth across the sky, which is easily forgotten in the face of the current geopolitical and social situation and the tendency to focus on one’s immediate environment: «I live under your sky too». Since 2004, this sentence has been projected in the artist’s handwriting across the sky in different languages and locations around the world. In Zurich, she presents the artwork in the languages it was shown in Mumbai: English, Urdu and Hindi.

Gupta refers to her childhood in Mumbai where she grew up in a multi-religious neighbourhood dotted with temples, mosques and churches. By incorporating these three languages, her work reflects the syncretic history of South Asia beyond geographical and religious borders. The present continues to be haunted by a brutal partition which took place nearly seventy years ago when the region was split into India and Pakistan. The latter made Urdu its official language, the former Hindi. Juxtaposing these two languages with widely-spoken English, the language of the coloniser, «I live under your sky too» not only reads as a poetic gesture, with which the artist connects the exhibition venue with a post-colonial hotspot of the world, but also as a political statement.

Gupta, born in 1976, works in various disciplines and media - from digital installations to performances. Her works are shown in galleries and museums worldwide, including the Tate Modern in London or the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and at Biennales, most recently at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

In view of the corona crisis, «I live under your sky too» is more relevant than ever. The pandemic not only shows how fragile the structures of the West are, it also emphasises the worldwide north-south divide. At the same time, the focus of public discourse is increasingly limited to national aspects. The installation on the shores of Lake Zurich is presented in the three languages spoken in Gupta’s homeland and redirects our gaze from what is closest to us to what is (supposedly) far away: India, for example, a country especially challenged by the Corona crisis. (rb)