KOCHI.- Shilpa Gupta presents an immersive constellation of sound, objects, and drawings that reflect on mobility, risk, and resilience. The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the unseen rhythms and quiet resonances that shape our inner worlds—an ode to the persistence of hope, memory, and renewal that hum beneath the surface of daily life.

At the centre of the exhibition is Listening Air, a kinetic sound installation in which microphones-turned-speakers orbit through a darkened room, carrying voices of solidarity that have migrated across landscapes and generations. Accompanying this work is Sound on My Skin, a 35-minute motion flapboard that transforms an object of transit into a poetic field of shifting text prompting viewers to question power, truth, and fear. For this space, the artist has conceived a new site-specific, interactive wall-based installation, Untitled, which invites viewers to create their own frottage drawing to take away.

“With this exhibition - comprising Listening Air, an immersive kinetic installation, and a new interactive wall-based work- I hope to share the conversations and experiences they hold with wider audiences from the art world and beyond in Kochi” says Shilpa Gupta.

This exhibition is presented with lead support from RMZ Foundation and the joint support of Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi) and Chemould Prescott Road (Mumbai), in addition to a crowdfunding initiative by art lovers.

LISTENING AIR
Kinetic multi-channel sound installation (2019–23)
From collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi

Listening Air (2019-23) is the central work in the exhibition is an in-motion installation composed of suspended microphones, each counterbalanced by a dimly lit light fixture, orbiting throughout the darkened gallery and between visitors. Transforming microphones into speakers, the work amplifies words and songs that have travelled across fields, forests, streets, and universities.

Interested in the potential of language, this work brings together voices that have been passed on and persisted through generations, evoking endurance, continuity, and the fragile tenacity of hope. “Bella Ciao” has travelled from the women rice-weeders of the Po Valley in Italy in the 1940s, to the farmers sit-down protest in Delhi in 2020; ‘We Shall Overcome’, a folk and labour song has journeyed through South Carolina in the United States, sung by tobacco-farm workers, onto the streets during the Civil Rights movement, further onto Tiananmen Square, and beyond; ‘Hum Dekhenge’, echoed here serving as a symbol of hope; ‘No Nos Moverán’ was adopted by Mexican migrants and farm-worker unions and continues to stay alive on both sides of the Atlantic; a rendition of a text by Nigerian poet and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, among other songs, echoes throughout the space.

The deliberate and continious movement of the microphones mirrors the energy and formation of individual voices. Different forms of speech challenge the structures of recognized languages and intertwine against systems of erasure, creating a disparate yet harmonious experience.

‘Listening Air’ is currently on view in Shilpa Gupta: We Last Met in the Mirror, the artists survey exhibition at Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lübeck. Previously presented in ‘Choreographies of the Everyday’ (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo), ‘Lines of Flight’ (Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai), ‘Dare to Dream’ (Venice Biennale Collateral), Centro Botín (Santander), and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), among other venues. The work will next be on view for nine months as part of a solo exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in 2026.

“Defying simple description and rewarding patient immersion, Listening Air consists of multiple microphones-turned-speakers that play songs of labor and resistance from around the world. As the songs fade in and out, listener-viewers in the dimly lit room slowly begin to perceive themselves as members of a temporary community. The effect is ethereal and meditative.” - Paul Stephens, E-flux, 2023

SOUND ON MY SKIN
Motion flapboard, 2024-25, 35min loop

Sound on my Skin (2024-25) a 35-minute motion flapboard reimagined to display a poetic stream of shifting, intentionally misspelled phrases, prompts viewers to question power, truth, and fear—inviting reflection on how perception is shaped, disrupted, and often taken for granted.

As phrases dissolve and morph into one another, the deliberate misspellings compel viewers to confront the expected and recognise the unexpected — mirroring how the ‘other’ often appears to us, in dialogue with our own assumptions. As with many of her works, Gupta is concerned with the acts of seeing and cognition, and with how constructed perceptions about the world are readily accepted as knowledge.

“Particularly haunting is the larger-than-life installation SOUND ON MY SKIN (2025), a black split-flap display suspended from the ceiling of the central gallery, evoking the shifting signage and atmosphere of a transit station, markedly devoid of its usual commotion. The gallery’s silence is ruptured only by the shuffling of the board as it displays phrases such as ‘WORD SHATTERS SOUNDLESSLY’ and ‘NO AIR FOR ME TO HEAR MYSELF’. The words, rendered in all caps, read like shouts heard by no one – signs of life echoing in a void. I am reminded again of Blanchot’s intentionally opaque musings: ‘He wrote, whether this was possible or not, but he did not speak. Such is the silence of writing.’ Gupta’s exhibition makes the case for art’s silence as a form of writing: when our voices are suppressed, we may still, impossibly, write.” - Vanessa Holyoak, Frieze, 2025

BREATHE
Interactive wall-based work, 2025

Spanning the exhibition’s second room, Breathe — a newly created 32-foot-long site-specific installation — extends the exhibition’s dialogue with the surrounding works. Emerges from ‘Nothing Will Go on Record’ series, the engravings reflect on presence and absence, on how the dissenting body, even when expelled, returns as murmurs along the walls, claiming space. Visitors are invited to lean in, rub paper against the etched surface, and carry away a frottage — an imprint which is part of the work, that becomes both its trace and a whispered continuation of it beyond the gallery.

In her artistic work, Shilpa Gupta (*1976, Mumbai) explores borders, language, surveillance, and censorship, revealing the invisible systems that shape identity and freedom. Through minimal yet poetic interventions, she evokes how silence carries weight and absence becomes resistance. Often blurring public and private boundaries, Gupta uses interactive technologies to invite participation and reflection. She challenges viewers to momentarily inhabit the position of the ‘other,’ fostering empathy and exposing the fragile threads that bind societies together.

Gupta's works across a range of media such as photographic images, interactive sound videos, robotic works, motorized mechanisms, found objects, computer-assisted installations, and public performances. Shilpa Gupta is one of the most recognized contemporary media artists internationally.

In 2021, MuHKA in Antwerp organized a comprehensive survey show of Shilpa’s work. She has had solo shows at several international venues, most notably: Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Arnolfini, Bristol; Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem; Kiosk, Ghent; Barbican, London; Dallas Contemporary; the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Bielefelder Kunstverein; and Lalit Kala Akademi in New Delhi.

Shilpa has participated in several biennials, such as: 58th Venice Biennale (2019, Kochi Muziris Biennale (2018), Gothenburg Biennial (2017), Berlin Biennale (2014), New Museum Triennial (2009); Sharjah Biennial (2013), Lyon Biennale (2009), Gwangju Biennale (2008), Yokohama Triennale (2008), and Liverpool Biennial (2006).

Her work has been shown and is in the collection of Tate Modern, Kiran Nadar Museum, Louisiana Museum, Centre Pompidou and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, ZKM, Ishara Art Foundation amongst others.

Shilpa has co-edited ‘For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit’ (2022) a poetry anthology which speaks truth to power. Shilpa has also co-facilitated Crossovers & Rewrites: Borders over Asia at World Social Forum in 2005 and Aar Paar, a public art exchange project between India and Pakistan (2002-2006).

Gupta is also the recipient of the 2025 Asia Society Pathbreaker Award and the prestigious Possehl Prize for International Art 2025.

In 2026, she will open a major solo exhibition at the prestigious Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.