Shilpa Gupta

This book will present a richly informative and analytical account of the work of the artist Shilpa Gupta, her ideas and projects, and the global political contexts in which she situates them. Poised at the intersection of art and technology, the sacred and the secular, Shilpa Gupta's work occupies multiple contexts: post-feminist art, technology-enabled art, and trans-cultural 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 THREATA", 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 labelled 'There is no explosive in this' with the '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. Thought-provoking and perceptive, Gupta's art emerges in response to the entanglements of the global contemporary world, making it universally accessible.