Shilpa Gupta

This book presents the work of one of India’s most exciting and internationally visible young artists who engages with the consequences of her country’s rising global prominence through her art. Poised at the intersection of art and technology, the sacred and the sexular, Shilpa Gupta’s work occupies multple contexts: post-feminist art, technology-enabled art, and transcultural art. The Mumbai-born artist uses interactive video, found objects, photography, sound, and public performance to probe the themes of desire, belief, terror, personal safety, and international security the bar of soap imprinted with the word «threat,» which can be used, thereby neutralizing the threat; the projection works Untitled (shadows), which require the audience to cast shadows of themselves onto a screen; the white packages labeled There is no explosive in this with no less prominent than the rest. This monograph features essays that discuss Gupta’s work from the perspective of new media, religious politics, the critique of the nation-state, and global violence. Thoughtprovoking and perceptive, Gupta’s art emerges in response to the entanglements of the global contemporary, making it universally accessible.