Shilpa Gupta: Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany

“I am concerned with perception and therefore with how definitions get stretched or trespassed, be it gender, beliefs, or the notion of a state.” - Shilpa Gupta

Shilpa Gupta’s video installation Untitled (2022), which was conceived especially for the Kestner Gesellschaft and exhibited on the roof, turns the architecture into a living organism. A video generates letters on 21 LED screens that form poetic messages. Emitted texts (IT WAS DARK THE, THE LIGHTS, THE LIGHTS TURNED ON, AND MY EYES SHUT) along with visual components, enter into a poetic and political polylogue with the city and its inhabitants, invoking notions of confinement and intimacy, but also legality and illegality, security and censorship, belonging and isolation. Invading public spaces and challenging our perception (THREAT, EAT, TREAT) in a conceptual echo of her numerous flapboards, the works continue to play with the notion of the movement of bodies across spaces and borders. Yet again, Shilpa Gupta reveals herself as a sensitive storyteller, a poet of the everyday human condition.

Passersby on Goseriedeplatz are invited to contemplate messages and images that silently appear and disappear in interrupted sequences, oftentimes in a chaotic order, bringing ambiguous feelings of anxiety and calm, making us pause and reflect on the hectic nature of our life, its poetry and prose.

Photos by Raimund Zakowski