Shilpa Gupta: Lines of Flight: Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai

Ishara Art Foundation opens 2025 with Lines of Flight, Shilpa Gupta’s first solo exhibition in West Asia.

Featuring a diverse selection of artworks from 2006 to the present that include a new sound installation, site-specific interventions, sculptures, drawings, prints and videos, the exhibition foregrounds Gupta’s longstanding critical engagement with narratives of mobility, control and acts of resilience.

Over the last two and a half decades, Shilpa Gupta’s interdisciplinary art practice has challenged how individual and collective identities are perceived, governed and orchestrated by the state and societal forces. Her work questions how people, places, everyday objects and languages get recast through nationality, gender and economic relations. By focusing on moments of unrest, Gupta’s work encourages viewers to participate in imagining a new poetics of resistance.

Lines have occupied an important place in Gupta’s art practice since the beginning of her career. Her work has frequently examined how modern systems of power and control depend on linear forms. From drawing national borders to declaring one’s ancestry through bloodlines and surnames, lines become the single most effective tool for political and social organization. Gupta’s work plays with such concrete and symbolic lines, subverting them through the friction of everyday encounters between the individual, the community and the state.

The exhibition brings together Gupta’s exploration of technologies of information. Flap-boards used for displaying train departure times relay broken words and phrases; documents used in administrative offices become haikus of witness testimonies; and microphones used for public announcements conceal speakers that convey voices of poets incarcerated for their beliefs. Each work in the exhibition demands a closer look, a deeper listening, to realize how every apparatus that tries to enforce limits is always transcended, and how every line that creates boundaries is surpassed by another line of new horizons.

Shilpa Gupta: Lines of Flight celebrates the practice of a contemporary artist who is deeply committed to voices of emancipation that transcend borders, imposed silences and conventions. The exhibition is curated by Sabih Ahmed, Director of the Ishara Art Foundation, and will be accompanied by physical and virtual tours, as well as educational and public programs.

Images: Installation view of Shilpa Gupta: Lines of Flight at Ishara Art Foundation, 2025. 

Image courtesy of Ishara Art Foundation and the artist. Photography by Ismail Noor/Seeing Things