Poignant. Beautiful. Unnerving. Shilpa Gupta’s first major London exhibition, “Sun at Night,” traverses the powerful themes of censorship, confinement and oppression with a variety of thought provoking pieces, including the ground-breaking sound installation “For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit.”
Upon entering the Curve gallery at the Barbican, viewers are greeted by two motion flapboards suspended from the ceiling. Gupta transforms the flapboards, traditionally found in public spaces such as airports or bus stops, into pieces that are engaging in a private conversation. Set on a 35 minute loop, the whir and flick of the flaps demand attention as the entire board spins to life, constructing a fragmented conversation. And although the large changes capture you, it’s the subtle ticks of small altered words, mere letters, that draws you in and causes you to wait on baited breath.
The body of the exhibit focuses on the words of imprisoned poets, forced to communicate through abstract methods because their voices and pens were stolen from them. A series of drawings bring to life the words of poets from around the word and around history, from Mushfig and Ratushinskaya criticizing the Soviet Union, to Hadraawi speaking out against the military regime, to Abu Nuwas an Arabic poet of the Eighth century.
Gupta uses a variety of materials across the multimedia display to display incredible command to space and texture. In one work, Gupta captures and preserves poems of protest and resistance in glass bottles. In another, interlocked paper books reflect how voices give strength to each other. And in another, a gunmetal cast of an open mouth demonstrates the silencing violence of state powers.
Despite the range of work depicting life-altering topics, there is one part of the exhibit that stands out amongst all others. The piece that will stay with you for years to come. “For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit” is an experiential sound exhibit that invites the viewer to enter and walk among the voices of war. In an oppressive gloom, a sea of spikes pierces pages of poetry standing beneath a cloud of hanging microphones. Dim light bulbs emit just enough honeyed light to make out the loose shapes on each page and the vague forms of the people around you. From each microphone, voices sing, whisper, laugh, and cry out in a cacophony of humanity, orchestrated in a song that reverberates in your very bones.
Shilpa Gupta’s “Sun at Night” is unnerving, beautiful, eerie and transformative. And although Gupta’s first exhibition is enjoying its last few days on display at the Barbican, I hope to see more of her work in London in the future.