THEN AND NOW
AAP 37: “Shilpa Gupta,” by Johan Pijnappel
Cassette recordings of people expressing joy, paintings made from clothes stained by menstrual blood, canvases blessed by holy men—these are some of the projects that Shilpa Gupta created in the 1990s and early 2000s. In an Essay on the Mumbai-based artist’s practice, curator Johan Pijnappel contextualized Gupta’s works as critical takes on India’s new consumerist society, one in the throes of globalization and in thrall to the new fast lanes of the worldwide web. Gupta’s technological savvy (2001), typically shown in the exhibition context on a single desktop computer. Pijnappel also explored Gupta’s perspectives around the place of women in society, noting that the sectarian violence of 1992–93 in Mumbai took place during the artist’s student days at the Sir JJ School of Art, and cited Rummana Hussain and Nalini Malani as established artists whose works of the time made powerful feminist statements. In one untitled installation work from 2001, Gupta fashioned together clothing that women had used, at the artist’s request, to absorb menstrual blood. Wrestling with the flux of Indian society and art-making itself, at the time Gupta embodied a post-conceptual, post-studio and post-national position as an artist—even if those terms hadn’t come into being just yet.
