Shilpa Gupta works across sculpture, video, installation, and performance, exploring how places, people, and objects are defined and asks us to assess ideas of place and belonging.

Gupta’s work speaks to the social, cultural, and political constructs and entanglements of our time, and in turn the interrelationships that connect or separate us.

For the biennial, Gupta presents two works in public spaces in the city. In the city park, a figure sits in silent dialogue with a tree. The work implicates the tree as an active agent in the exchange and asks viewers to step out of their everyday lives and listen anew. Elsewhere, a light work in the form of an animated sentence reads I Live Under Your Sky Too in Sámi, Swedish, and Urdu. Using national, indigenous, and migrant languages, the work proffers that there is a space for us all beyond the construction of man-made borders, while also reminding us of those voices that might be forgotten in our communities.

Shilpa Gupta lives and works in Mumbai, India, where she studied sculpture at the Sir J.J. School of Fine Arts from 1992 to 1997. She has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Arnolfini in Bristol, OK in Linz, Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Arnhem, Voorlinden Museum and Gardens in Was­senaar, Kiosk in Ghent, Bielefelder Kunstverein, La synagogue de Delme Contemporary Art Center and Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi. She presented a solo project at My East Is Your West, a two-person joint India-Pakistan exhibition by the Gujral Foundation in Venice in 2015.

Selected group exhibitions include: The 58th Venice Biennale (2019),Kochi Muziris Biennale (2018), NGV Triennale (2017),Berlin Biennale (2014), New Museum Triennale (2009), Sharjah Biennial curated by Yuko Hasegawa (2013), Lyon Biennale curated by Hou Hanru (2009), Gwangju Biennaledirected by Okwui Enwezor and curated by Ranjit Hoskote (2008), Yokohama Trien­nale curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (2008), and Liverpool Biennial curated by Gerardo Mosquera (2006). She has shown in biennales in Auckland, Brisbane, Seoul, Havana, Sydney, Yogyakarta, Echigo-Tsumari, Shanghai, Houston, and others. In 2017, she participated in the Gothenburg Biennial curated by Nav Haq, which was titled after her light work WheredoIendandyoubegin.