[ISEA2004] Artist Statement: Shilpa Gupta – M.O.L.: MY OWN LABEL

Artist Statement

WEARABLE EXPERIENCE PUBLIC SPACE PROJECT

(Re)design your very own label for one of your favourite products! Simple, quick, reliable and easy just make a selection from the menus and click on ‘Print’.

Shilpa Gupta’s My Own Label project develops a new approach to the subversive activity known as ‘shopputting’ — where home-made artefacts [CD’s, sandwiches etc.) are taken to supermarkets and left amongst the retail produce for customers to discover and purchase (or steal!). Instead of creating a new product. however, My Own Label allows you to create a new label which can replace the label for an existing product.

It a project based on excessive branding in a world where consumerism reaches ever higher levels in the capitalist economy, and where globalization is still pretty much a one-way street without sign posts or rules (read: WTO guidelines). It is also a subtle critique of art, which Gupta believes has become too comfortable in its elitist circles to employ a language that is accessible to a wider audience. It also intents to address authorship [via its erasure] and the extension of the electronic medium into outside ‘lived’ space.

  • Shilpa Gupta‘s work has been exhbited at Saatchi Gallery and NGMA in Mumbai, where she lives, and at the Tate Modern (London), FAAM (Fukuoka City), Culturgest (Lisbon), Artspace (Sydney), and MAAP (Beijing) amongst other places. Recent projects are Blessed Bandwidth, commissioned by the Tate, and Your Kidney Supermarket, which won the Tnansmediale.

Full document (PDF) p. 95