Patricia Miranda on Shilpa Gupta
Shilpa Gupta, For, in your tongue, I cannot fit; 2017-18, Sound installation with 100 speakers, microphones, printed text, and metal stands
O waterfall, why are you lamenting?
Zeb-Un-Nissa
Detained 18th century
A darkened room, hushed, on the periphery of visibility. The sound of voices, a reading of texts, a singing of songs rises and falls in volume, intensity, and clarity. A garden of spikes in neatly gridded rows, like dangerous cannibalistic plants, or spindly malnourished soldiers in formation, bayonets at attention, awaits the call to battle. Spotlights illuminate white sheets of paper, 100 in all, pierced bluntly onto the sharp poles. The paper – white, ghostly, struck through its heart, floats in space like the upturned body of impaled fish.
Microphones hang over each spike, old-fashioned, bulbous, and ribbed — reminiscent of crooners or radio announcers of the 1950’s and 60’s. The microphones perform rather than record voices, exhaling sound they can no longer ingest. A disembodied voice quietly reads, before a chorus rises up to repeat verse and song, in languages ancient to modern, east to west, north to south. The intimacy and music of a language, understood or heard as purely melodic, vibrates in the body. Enveloped by the sound, walking in the theatrical darkness amongst the fluttering paper, our eyes slowly adjust to reveal the black, stark, typed words. Text. Name. Dates detained. Sometimes several dates, for those imprisoned over and over again. Words suppressed, censored, silenced.
How bitter language has now become,
and how narrow the door to the alphabet.
Adonis, Detained 1955
The title of the work, For, in your tongue, I cannot fit, is based on a poem by 14th century Azerbaijani poet Nesimi, and features dissident poets silenced by the state from the eighth century to contemporary times. Writers include Malay Roychoudhury, Ashraf Fayadh, Huang Xiang, Osip Mandelstam, Mahmoud Darwish, Martin Carter, Irina Ratushinskaya, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, among others. The languages include English, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Azeri, and Hindi.
Their words, read or spoken and reverberating in our bodies, were meant to shake the doors of power. In prose, meaning is built in the linked chain of words, train cars sequenced through the mind’s eye, at different speeds, tempos, altitudes. Poetry builds significance in the space left between the words. A pause, comma, line shift, period. The air around the words oscillates into meaning. The writers here are quoted with extreme brevity. This miniature bite, combined with the lack of background information, has the effect of locating them with intense particularity. At the same time, it erases the borders that biography might inculcate. The edges of time, space, culture, and biography concurrently exist and evaporate into a chorus of communal meditation, in ways that only art can do. The voice is another human body standing close, whispering their most private thoughts in my ear. I stand in another’s shoes, eyes, ears. I do not become them; I am not even in solidarity. I am in relation, in the most intimate way. I want to run to the library and ravenously research each writer.
And I’ll press my trembling hands to the hole that was my heart
Irina Ratushinskaya, Detained 1982
The piece holds a haunting, subversive beauty while inhabiting a strident polemic. Gupta employs taut specificity and brings her own interiority to bear in both highlighting and collapsing these borders. She is a master of quiet seduction, bringing us close to the bone of an undeniable politic without polarizing us into hardened oppositions. Yet they are not interchangeable, these poets, these words, these languages, these epochs. These partitions and prisons. They share humanity’s artful desire, and its fear.
If you want love until the end
You must
Eat poison but call it honey
Rabi’ A Balkhi, Detained 10th century
When humans first saw the earth from space, it appeared as a tiny, fragile, autonomous island, round, singular, floating in a vast darkness. An only. Its wholeness was finally and only visible to us by our ability to see it from a great distance. A view that, through its mere fact of existence, without invective, simultaneously reveals the absurdity of our borders and the universality of their policing. Past, present, me, you, dissolve in that image. In the relational experience of Martin Buber’s I-Thou. Like this artwork, that view of aching beauty, hope, and commonality instantiates us in our bodies, and connects us to every soul in our lineage of persons. It also underlines the sharp edge of our condemnation, hatred, and violence. It is a human condition to draw edges – lines of imagined demarcation – that much too often require savagery to maintain.
For bullets aren’t the seeds of life.
Majhoub Sharif, Detained 1970, 1971, 1980, 1990
Thus, I offered my safe wings to the air
What others see far, I leave behind.
Giordano Bruno, Detained 1592
Note: Artists and writers are continually at risk from authoritarian regimes. At the time of this essay, Pen America lists over 1000 imprisoned writers around the world. Learn more about threats to writers, banned books, and how to support the power of words at https://pen.org/
I have books full of wishes
As provisions for this world and the next
Ajmal Khattak, Detained 1953
Patricia Miranda, Where there is serene length, 2021, Donated and found repurposed vintage textile, vintage books, muslin, twill tape, silk and cotton thread, pins, steel hoop, wood armature, pvc piping. 90x90x84" (Installation, Jane Street Art Center, Saugerties NY)
Patricia Miranda is an artist, curator, educator, and founder of the artist-run orgs The Crit Lab, MAPSpace, and the Lace Archive, an historical community archive of thousands of donated lace works and family histories. Recent exhibitions include The Olin Fine Art Center; Jane Street Art Center; Spartanburg Art Museum; Dunedin Fine Art Center; Hudson Valley MOCA; The Lyman Allyn Museum; and an upcoming solo exhibition at Five Points Center for the Visual Arts.
