Edinburgh Art Festival, a leading annual visual arts festival, is showcasing her installations this year. Her work erected by the sea on Carter Road in Bandra, Mumbai,  ‘I Live Under Your Sky Too’  in which she used the three dominant languages used by religious communities in her neighborhood to forge dialogues on gender, identity, politics and religion, was widely appreciated. Meet Shilpa Gupta, the contemporary Indian artist from Mumbai, who has studied sculpture from Sir J.J. School of Fine Arts from 1992 to 1997. 

Shilpa’s work has been shown in leading international Institutions and museums around the world. From Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon to Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, USA or Tate Modern , Serpentine Gallery in London and Centre Pompidou in Paris, she has been everywhere. She has participated in 8th Berlin Biennale, Sharjah Biennale ’13, Younger Than Jesus Triennale in New York and several others at Auckland, Seoul, Havana, Sydney and Shanghai. 

A new media artist, Gupta has influenced several artists by engaging art in a participatory and interactive manner. Her work makes visible the logical disjunctions and incompatibilities in the emerging public sphere in India, often including gender and caste barriers, religious differences, deceptive ideas of public consensus enabled by the new age mass media etc.

The latest work at Edinburgh Art Festival, inspired by the words of detained poets is titled, ‘For, in your tongue I cannot hide: 100 Jailed Poets’. It includes 100 microphones suspended above the same number of metal rods, each of which pierces a page inscribed with a fragment of poetry.

All those selected for inclusion have been detained during a period spanning hundreds of years. In this creation she intends to give voice to poets who have been jailed through the centuries,offering a reflection on freedom of expression (or perhaps the lack of it).