Dubai’s Ishara Art Foundation is starting its 2025 programme with a timely solo exhibition from Indian artist Shilpa Gupta, marking her first show in West Asia. Titled Lines of Flight, the showcase presents a diverse selection of artworks from 2006 to the present day, from sound installations and paintings to sculptures and video works, all looking at themes of resilience, mobility, borders, and identity.
Spanning 25 years, Shilpa’s interdisciplinary practice has explored how people, cultures, and languages have responded and adapted to social and political constructs, dictating migration, nationality and more. The Ishara show therefore looks at her practice through the lens of lines, capable of both separating and being the impetus to be crossed over.
“Growing up as a woman in South Asia, one becomes aware of lines early on, and where boundaries exist, methods to navigate and negotiate them inevitably emerge,” Shilpa says. “After all, mobility is intrinsic to being human – one of the first things we did as a species was stand up and walk. The systems that surround us seek to define, to control, and stay in power. They use maps, graphs, symbols, and even myths.”
“However, when people find these restrictive, they find ways to subvert them – they masquerade, infiltrate and catapult,” she adds. “What interests me are not just lines that enclose, but also ‘vector’ lines, as the exhibition’s curator Sabih Ahmed describes them. These lines criss-cross and leap beyond the boundaries, carrying hope, aspiration, and even desperation.”
Lines, in many forms, have been a recurring topic in Shilpa’s repertoire since the early days of her career, when she explored how borders, bloodlines, and systems of control or power tend to follow organised, linear forms. She is therefore also interested when these lines are crossed or broken down, as acts of resistance flare up or trajectories converge to create something new or more complex.
In practice, her works often utilise the tools of control and order to create artworks that place creativity and agency at the forefront – such as documents used in administrative offices becoming haikus of witness testimonies.
“The earliest work in the show dates back to 2006, which is this depiction of a flag made of border tapes. But when you come and read closely, those border tapes have a phrase saying ‘There is no border here’ – it kind of already starts to show the contradiction,” Sabih tells Villa 88. “It’s a reflection on the idea of nationalities and national flags, which on the one hand have always stood for sovereignty and claiming freedom for countries, but on the other hand, also end up policing borders and creating new regimes of inclusion and exclusion.”
These are the kinds of themes that recur in Shilpa’s practice, using very specific spaces, places in the world. And her practice is truly global,” he adds. “We felt that these topics are all the more urgent today, when so many countries are interested in building walls, creating borders, creating more strict procedures for visas and travels, and also, at the same time, so many people are having to migrate because of circumstances and conditions which force them to leave their homeland.”
Split into four galleries, the exhibition navigates different focal themes across her career, with the first gallery dedicated to the plight of censorship and artistic freedom. Surrounding the gallery are works from the Untitled (Jailed Poet Drawings) series – which considers language as a medium of resistance – showing drawn silhouettes of missing or imprisoned poets, accompanied by a fragment of text.
“Language is an active site which individuals claim as their own. This is the context from where the sound installation Listening Air emerges. A Liquid, the Mouth Froze, is about how ostentatious power can become, especially when we are not looking,” Shilpa explains. “In Untitled (Spoken Poem in a Bottle), poems by poets who have been imprisoned have been spoken into bottles – while regimes imprison the body of the poet, it’s impossible to contain their words, which travel and live on.”
The second gallery opens with 12 digital prints of a cloud of smoke in various interior settings, such as homes or an office, from the Untitled (Smoke Series), which explores ideas of looming threats and the cracks between boundaries.
A kinetic installation titled StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream is the real focus piece of the gallery, made from two flap-boards, usually found in airports and train stations, suspended from the ceiling.
Rather than announcing departure and arrival times, they instead show fragments of words and phrases in dialogue between the two boards, evoking a conversation interrupted by a sudden announcement of departure.
The third gallery presents one of her most recent creations, a new kinetic installation titled Listening Air, which fuses text and sculpture into a dynamic choreography. The artwork comprises five suspended microphones, each counterbalanced by a dim light fixture, that orbit around the darkened gallery between visitors.
The microphones serve as speakers reciting poetry that has travelled vast distances. They include a poem by Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, which was sung as a protest anthem on university campuses across India; Italian songs sung by women who worked as rice-paddy farmers, used in the farmers’ protests in India; and many others. It is a hopeful reminder of adversities that can be overcome, both past and present.
The fourth gallery features an interactive artwork, consisting of a table with numerous closed envelopes, each containing shredded documents detailing the abuse of state power on the Bangladesh–India border. An instruction sign tells visitors to “Take away one. Open after crossing 150 yards – the distance between the zero line and the fence where no defensive structure is permitted”, thus placing people directly in the shoes of those attempting to make the crossing.
The exhibition offers a deeper understanding of Shilpa’s work, touching on topics that many will connect to on some level, exploring global issues through familiar, human narratives, which have become all the more poignant in the past few years.
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