- "The exhibition – Gupta’s first in Spain – on display at Centro Botín
from 23 March to 8 September 2024, is an evocative presentation of her
most recent work, in which voice and poetry will flood the exhibition
hall, to reclaim the existence of those who have been muted and blur the
borders that limit the movement of individuals, goods or ideas.
- Centro Botín will feature a new sound installation commissioned for the occasion. Listening Air
is a shared listening space in which a set of suspended, rotating
microphones will – relay protest songs that have resonated in diverse
and faraway landscapes and communities throughout generations.
- With Gupta, Centro Botín inaugurates its 2024 exhibition calendar,
which will continue with visual scores by the Swiss artist Silvia Bächli
(11 May) and the performative, humorous works of the Japanese artist
Shimabuku (5 October).
- Curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Director of Exhibitions and the
Collection at Centro Botín, the exhibition will be accompanied by a
publication, co-edited with La Fábrica, with texts from art historian
and curator Rattanamol Johal, artist and poet María Salgado, the
academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta and the curator herself.
- In addition, Gupta in collaboration with Renata Cervetto will lead
the next Fundación Botín Art Workshop in Santander, inviting artists and
art educators to participate in an intensive initiative – in the style
of a residency – where they will live, reflect and create together.
Centro Botín inaugurates its annual exhibition programme with I Live Under Your Sky Too,
a solo exhibition dedicated to the renowned Indian artist Shilpa Gupta
(Mumbai, 1976). From 23 March to 8 September 2024, visitors can discover
this evocative presentation of her most recent work – her first solo
show in Spain – where voice and poetry flood the second-floor exhibition
hall of Centro Botín to reclaim the existence of those who have been
muted and blur the borders that limit the movement of individuals, goods
or ideas.
Artist, Shilpa Gupta, said: “The show looks at how we as individuals
traverse visible and invisible expectations and impositions. It includes
some new works in conversation with works from the past two decades,
looking at mobility, persistence and risk of the body and speech”.
Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Director of Exhibitions and the Collection
at Centro Botín and curator of this exhibition, said: “Gupta is one of
South Asia’s most relevant artists, as much for the growing
international profile of her work as for her admirable commitment and
integrity. I think it’s important to note how the beauty, generosity and
clear intention of her practice go hand in hand with her unwavering
pursuit of freedom of expression and movement. For this exhibition, we
have selected recent works in which voice and poetry cross borders and
generations, inviting visitors to participate in a collective chant of
life”.
Silences and absences derived from censure and isolation are
ever-present concerns in the artist’s work. For that reason, she works
with the written, sung or spoken word as a place for resistance,
visibility and empathy, something apparent in I live under your sky too
an LED light installation with the phrase of the show’s title – written
in English, Spanish and Urdu – that reminds us that this exhibition
sets a clear intention of being present.
The political context of South Asia, where the artist grew up, a
place with constant social, territorial and border disputes, has clearly
influenced her constant return to borders and how they have enormous
consequences on the lives and freedom of a civil population. As such, we
can understand her work as an exercise in crossing, blurring and
finally dissolving these limits from the national and ideological to the
imagined. Gupta’s insistence on filling empty spaces with voices from
diverse communities and in numerous languages is a natural consequence
of her life in Mumbai, in an extraordinarily multicultural and
polyphonic environment, immersed in a sea of languages, religions,
cultures and beliefs. This daily experience translates into a body of
work that links us with the unknown, with the unfamiliar, with languages
that we do not understand but that, even so, can penetrate our
unconscious.
Thus, the exhibition’s central work is a shared listening space titled Listening Air
(2019-2024), commissioned for the show by Fundación Botín. In it, a set
of suspended, rotating microphones relay voices from several
historically oppressed communities, making audible the words that have
resonated in faraway and diverse countries, connecting rice fields,
forests, streets and universities from different parts of the world. The
work includes, ‘Bella Ciao’, which has travelled from the women rice
weeders of the Po Valley in Italy in the 1940’s, to the farmers sit down
protest in New Delhi in 2020. ‘We Shall Overcome’, a folk and labor
song which has journeyed through South Carolina in the United States,
sung by tobacco farm workers, onto the streets during the civil rights
movement, further onto Beijing´s Tiananmen Square, and beyond. ‘Hum
Dekhenge’, penned by poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz in 1979 in Pakistan,
transcended borders, echoing on Indian university campuses, serving as a
symbol of hope during recent political unrest. ‘No Nos Moverán’ which
originated as a spiritual of the enslaved Africans in the Southern
United States, a cry for freedom that traversed decades to become one of
the first chants in response to the 1973 coup d’état in Chile and
crossed the Atlantic to be sang during students and workers protests in
Spain until now. The perception of language and the song become a shared
physical experience in which the visitor forms part of the
installation’s choreography, experiencing and reacting to the recorded
voices.
Visiting the exhibition
The first thing the visitors encounter upon entering the exhibition space is Untitled
(2018-2024), a series of subtle tracings on paper that mark the curves
of different bodies with the voids left by others as if they had
vanished, highlighting their absences and making them more poignant. It
consists of poets including Italy, Russia, Turkey, China, Azerbaijan,
Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Korea who, throughout history,
have been imprisoned for what they have said or written. The drawings
are framed in fragile wooden bars and are accompanied by verses taken
from their poems. These drawings form part of an immense transhistorical
and transcultural research project about poetry and repression, which,
in this exhibition, is also manifested in a series of pieces made from
everyday materials: A household vitrine displays a series of glass
apothecary bottles whose tags contain censored verses of poetry and,
inside, the invisible breath of the same verses whispered by the artist (Untitled, Spoken Poem in a Bottle, 2021-2024); a fragile and ominous tower of 21 pencil points on a wooden pedestal (Tower of Broken Pencils,
2021) notes the persistence of the poet’s work despite the violence
against their instruments; a small, wedge-shaped portion of a clock cast
in gunmetal (Visitor Hours, 2021) alludes to the material time allotted in prisons to outside visitors.
The body – absent, fragmented and alluded to – is presented across
the exhibition hall in several works of transcendent beauty that are
subtle and modest in their means. As is typical in the artist’s constant
exploration of human expression, approaching them provokes tension in
our body and penetrates our psyche. A clear example of this is Untitled, Distance Between Two Tears (2021), an aluminium rod marking the distance between two of the artist’s pupils; or in A Liquid, the Mouth Froze (2018), a gunmetal sculpture cast in the shape of the negative of the inside of an open mouth; also in Untitled
(2021-2023), a series of black pedestals, of different heights, also
cast in gunmetal, alludes to the possibility of rising (above them) and
seeing other horizons. The hall also holds wax sheets of indeterminate
shapes (Body Cast, 2023) that occupy the space of the artist’s own body, a body in negative that has been flattened, divided and stacked.
Through the exhibition, we can understand Gupta’s work as an exercise
in crossing, blurring and, finally, dissolving national, ideological
and even imagined borders. In 100 Hand Drawn Maps of Spain
(2024), a piece specifically produced for this exhibition, 100 people
from different Spanish cities (Santander, San Sebastián and Barcelona,
among others) have sketched the outline of the map of Spain from memory
in the pages of a book, sheets of paper that are then blown by a fan,
illustrating how political borders are constructed and learned. Along
those same lines, Stars on Flags of the World (2024) is a
textile embroidered with stars for all of the world’s countries, both
internationally recognized and not. Some stars have slipped off their
original flags and lay atop others, evoking the fluidity of people and
identities.
The exhibition ends with StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream (2021),
an analogue board with mobile panels like those found in train stations
and airports to announce the arrivals and departures of trains and
planes and that, on this occasion, rhythmically generates a series of
brief phrases written by the artist. Floating between the coherent and
the incoherent, the personal and the social, the words intertwine and
fragment (errors included), opening themselves to the infinite emotional
conjectures of the human experience.
This exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, co-edited with
La Fábrica, that includes texts written specifically for this project by
the art historian Rattanamol Johan, the artist and poet María Salgado,
the academic Pratap Bhanu Mehta and the show’s curator, Bárbara
Rodriguez Muñoz. Additionally, before the opening, Gupta will invite
artists and art educators to participate in the Fundación Botín Art
Workshop that she will lead in Santander as a foreword to her
exhibition. Designed in collaboration with art historian and curator
Renata Cervetto, the artist has conceived it as a space for reflection
and experimentation on new pedagogies and education, all as a
fundamental tool of artistic expression and social compromise."
