Essay on Shilpa Gupta’s Camouflash.
On the Border: Shilpa Gupta’s Camouflash
Shilpa Gupta, an international contemporary Indian artist, based in Mumbai, uses unconventional objects, many of the found objects, to create works of art. Gupta uses several different mediums also including video, computer based installation and peformance art, and other more traditional and tangible materials to convey the usually political messages in her artwork. Gupta’s interests include politics which fascinate her. Born and educated in Mumbai, her art is themed with the politics of India and one of its next door neighbors, Pakistan. She has included excursions to the border area between the two countries in several of her works. She explores human perception and the way one can understand a work of art in layers of varying perceptions based on the varying experiences that different people have. One way that she conveys the message of the variances of human perception is to use methods of delivery that use both internal and external forms of transmission. For instance, in the work Camouflash, discussed later, she uses performance art that could be enacted anywhere, but also films it so there is a recording of a performance that serves as a work of art also. At the same time Gupta’s work is inclusive of many different perspectives, it is also is contradictory because it also questions the place where the work is exhibited, the experience that people will have when they encounter her work, and the experience people who may come into contact with her work may have when they do encounter it. When people do encounter Gupta’s art work they understand why she is a world renowned artist even if they do not agree with her message or her methods. Her work at the India-Pakistan border represents the abstract borders she sees in society between power and weakness, wealth and poverty, and art and pretense. These borders inform her art work.
Gupta’s upbringing in India and its political issues influence her work in many ways. One influence is a concerted effort in her art work to surprise people, to be unconventional. Gupra also tries to be inclusive by staging her work at places where anyone who is interested can observe, participate or protest. She sees boundaries and borders in many aspects of life, but one place where she likes to stage installation and performance art works is at the India-Pakistan border. One of Gupta’s recent works includes a huge ball of thread titled “1:14.9.” Gupta wound the yarn into a ball herself and it symbolizes the 1,907 kilometers or 1,185 miles of along the border between India and Pakistan that had been fenced. The title of the art work represents the ration of the length of thread, 79.5 miles, to the length of the fence. In other words, it would take 14.9 huge balls of yarn the same size as the one that she created to equal the length of the border fence. This piece demonstrates her fascination with the border which is near where she grew up in Mumbai. This border story interests Gupta because she has been to the India-Pakistan border many times and sees the demarcation as arbitrary because before Pakistan suddenly became a country in 1947, many people did not know the demarcation was going to happen. They were cut off from their families and friends by an international border seemingly over night. Gupta uses her art work performed there as protest of the border even existing. Of course that is not the way the Indian and Pakistani border guards see it and she has caused some trouble with her staging of border installation and performance art. From out of those staged episodes, came the artwork she calls Camouflash.
Staging performance art at a border populated with soldiers trained to not allow any kind of funny business may not be the most rational way to proceed, yet Gupta managed to get away with it. She believes that the India-Pakistan border is a perfect place to stage art because such a charged place gives the art that much more depth and symbolism. Not only that, people who probably do not normally see performance art get to experience it. Staging art works in a remote place fraught with danger is exactly what Gupta envisions as a perfect location. Nakita Jain of India Today explains by quoting Gupta: “A people's artist, Gupta does not want art to remain confined to galleries. By organising group shows on video art, she tries to educate the masses about the language of art. ‘My work has no boundaries. It can be understood by a four-year-old as well as a 60-year-old,’ she says.”[1] Not only can Gupta’s work be understood by a wide variety of age groups, but also by many different cultures. While much of her work is framed by the border issues, her wo