SHILPA GUPTA IN CONVERSATION WITH NOURA DIRANI

The artist Shilpa Gupta, born in Mumbai, India, in 1976, is one of India's most important media artists and lives and works in her native city. From 1992 to 1997, she studied at the Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts in Mumbai. Gupta's multifaceted work is represented in institutions such as the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, and the Mori Art Museum. Her work initially gained strong recognition abroad at biennials before receiving attention in her home country. Her most recent awards include the Possehl Prize for International Art 2025. On this occasion, the Kunsthalle St. Annen in Lübeck presents Shilpa Gupta. we last met in the mirror, her first major museum solo exhibition in Germany which due to high interest was prolonged until April 6th, 2026. The accompanying catalog Shilpa Gupta. we last met in the mirror was published in January 2026. Furthermore works of Shilpa Gupta will be on display  in her exhibition What Still Holds at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin from March 27, 2026.

In conversation with Noura Dirani, art historian and director of the Kunsthalle St. Annen since 2022, as well as editor and one of the authors of the catalog Shilpa Gupta. we last met in the mirror the artist talks about her early interest in everyday materials, which contemporary positions inspire her, and how to provoke a story to be told through the dialogue of the artwork and the viewer.

Noura Dirani (ND): You studied at the Sir J. J. Art School in Mumbai. The admission requirements are not easy; only a few applicants are admitted, right? The school’s curriculum is oriented toward classical painting and sculpture. You began working with everyday objects early on during your studies. How did you get into it? Which artistic positions are important inspirations for your work, historic and contemporary? 

Shilpa Gupta (SG): Yes, the fine arts program at J. J.—the only degree course in the city—draws thousands of applications, of which barely 2 to 3 percent pass through into its colonial, stone building with sprawling grounds in the city center. It is a strictly academic course with tight departments of painting, sculpture, metal craft, so on. As from early on, I was working with everyday objects, I opted for sculpture, which turned out to having a strong focus on life drawing and modeling.

I went to school in 1992. The first year of the art school remained shut for many months due to sectarian riots that had gripped the migrant city, tearing into its cosmopolitan dream. It was also the time when the government introduced new liberalization policies and the city seemed to change overnight with a profusion of giant billboards. A few months into art school, I remember, carrying from home an object—thread wound tightly by hand, into which I had woven small bells, carefully plucked from my Kathak ankle belt. Kathak, a form of classical dance, was something I had been enrolled in since childhood—though I was never drawn to it. When I showed this somewhat unusual object to my sir, my art teacher, he politely remarked that such work belonged at home— ghar ka kaam. It was 1992—and neither of us knew the word “installation art.” So, while I went through the formal classes at school, I maintained a parallel practice— ghar ka kaam —experimental work that I would occasionally bring into the classroom. So, from early on, I have been drawn to working with the objects we surround ourselves with—modifying them just slightly, for a second look at the stories they might or can carry about us, to think about what art is, and the spillovers between art and life. 

For a while, I worked in a bubble, as the academic corridors of J. J. did not go beyond eighteenth and nineteenth century and we meet Picasso and Cubism in history books only in our later years. And two and half contemporary art galleries were in another world. But one day, one staircase led me to probably what might be one of the only books on contemporary art in the dusty school library, which is packed with giants from the past. And I remember opening it and encountering Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs. And I thought, finally, here is a friend who understands me. It was a thrilling moment. And a sad moment. Thrilling because there was so much great work out there which one could relate to. Sad, because it took away the charm of excitement of treading new spaces. 
[...]

ND: You have spoken of everyday art. Your works combine art and life and are frequently participatory. Your art evokes events and experiences that the viewers have, and your work only seems to be completed in this eventfulness: Can you comment on this?

SG: I am interested in the slippery life of meaning. How it is made, carried, and transformed. How it can sometimes become static and sometimes can come alive, even briefly, when we blink and look again. And change. I am interested in the possibility of shifts in the space between the object and the onlooker. Sometimes, when a work is carried out of the gallery by the viewer and begins to journey through the street, or sits within a domestic space, it enters a shared realm. There, it sheds some of the ossified meanings of “art,” and the possibility of conversation expands. When a conversation is less staged, it can be more fluid, lighter, and more open to exchange. There are also certain participatory works that ask you to join in—to hold the tension as we journey together with them. For example, with There is No Explosive in This, or the work where you can carry a gravestone from an unmarked grave. No two journeys with these works are ever the same. One person buried the gravestone, another put it on display, another couldn’t decide what to do with it and carried it in the boot of their car for days, while someone else returned it. When others encounter the work in the domestic spaces, the participants may become storytellers.

ND: Your works often emerge from the experienced moment, from directly experienced reality. You often deal with themes of borders, oppression, and censorship. How can you address these topics in areas that are themselves characterized by the fact that borders are fought over—the division of India in 1947 was the beginning of many other conflicts that continue to this day. How do you move through these often politically sensitive topics as an artist?

SG: Art comes from a place of compulsion, where one is driven by forces beyond oneself. In the early 2000s, I found myself in Srinagar, a place torn apart with the creation of two countries. This experience later led me to the border in the east, where, despite the near completion of the world’s longest fence encircling Bangladesh, built by India, the movement of people and goods persists. Listening to stories of daily life, of how people negotiate or even subvert such vast structures around them interests me. While maps of the nation appear sharp and defined in history books, on the ground they become blurred.

ND: Your art is very much located in the city of Mumbai, which is characterized by different realities of life, between tradition, modernity, and globalization. On our tour of Mumbai, you said that your “art would not be without the city and the sea.” What inspires you in particular?

SG: People say that every day 200 people step off the trains at Mumbai’s central station, driven by desperation or desire. Even if the number isn’t exact, this is how it feels—a place in constant motion. Getting off at a main train station and walking into the city, into its bazaars, listening to its sounds and diverse languages—this enters under the skin. I feel that without this, and without the sea, my work would not be the same—both are about movement, change, drifting, multiplicity, and rhythm.

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ND: Where are you heading? What are you currently working on?

SG: I don’t know where . . . I rarely have a destination and am only just traveling, looking, finding, and learning. The fast-moving nature of images and emotion, which shifts with each scroll, is something I continue to grapple with. There is immense confusion, and a growing lack of trust or patience to listen to those who live and feel differently. Some of this will find a way into an outdoor text-based public art project I am working on these days.

The full-length conversation between Shilpa Gupta and Noura Dirani can be found in our publication  Shilpa Gupta. we last met in the mirror.

Header: Shilpa Gupta © Belén de Benito