Shilpa Gupta

In his treatise on literature’s relationship to loss and the limits of representation, The Writing of the Disaster (1980), Maurice Blanchot suggests that ‘[w]hoever writes is exiled from writing, which is the country ~ his own - where he is not a prophet’.

- Vanessa Holyoak

For the French theorist, writing is inextricably linked to absence, erasure and exile, shaped by the spectre of what cannot be said. This negative space left behind by writing - and, indeed, by art — finds poignant expression in Indian artist Shilpa Gupta’s solo presentation at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, ‘Some suns fell off’. Through a series of minimalist interventions, Gupta articulates the keenly felt absences of voices exiled from public life, while probing incorporeal structures that shape systems of control, such as the nation-state.

Set against the backdrop of the authoritarian political moment unfolding in the United States - marked by a government obsessed with enforcing arbitrary restrictions on freedom through the policing of national borders - the fibre-based works in Gupta’s exhibition quietly illuminate the invisible threads that bind us. Stars on Flags of the World, July 2011 (2012-23), a large-scale hanging embroidery outlining unravelling stars from various national flags, and