Artists Statement

Theme: Pacific Rim. Venue: Container Culture: Mumbai Container. Venue: South Hall. Curator: Johan Pijnappel

In several of Shilpa Gupta’s recent works, the artist herself pops up as the protagonist on web sites and videos dressed up in clothes made out of military camouflage fabric. This style has become popular first in the West, since the onset of the “War on Terror” campaign, and more recently spilling east onto the streets outside her home in Mumbai. In shops just two blocks from where Gupta lives, camouflage gear is plentifully available. Gupta presents this under the slogan “Camouflage makes you feel Cool and Terror is quite Cool.” This military masquerade occurs as well in her first interactive video installation, Untitled (2004-2005), to be presented at ISEA2006/ZeroOne. The artist chose to cover the outside of the exhibition container in a manner complementing her style of clothing: with the battleship camouflage technique called ‘dazzle painting’.
In the inside wall projection, seven clones of Gupta appear lined up, each in a different masquerade version. She eloquently describes the works as follows.

“Click with the mouse on the figures and they move, they copy, they imitate. Click one, click two, choose a leader, become a leader and the rest follow. If they stop, click them up and they join. Exercise 1-2-3-4. One Bend, Two Bend, Three Bend, Stay. Look Straight — Don’t See — STAY. I have a bag, I have a phone, my neighbour has a phone, my phone, I don’t have a phone, I don’t have a shopping bag, but I need to JOG for it. Jog Jog jog Stay on the spot. Jog Jog Stay Stay
March Free Speech Free Press Free Market March Market Market March Free Speech No Speech No Press Market Market Market march March
Dumb-ed in a capitalist society, we enjoy being programmed. We find instant satia¬tion and loss of memory in turning our¬selves into puppets. We allow media,
electronic extensions of ourselves now in the hands of a corporate often with state support nexus to think for us and amputate individual reasoning (McLuhan). Mental and physical activity slips from the mechanical to the mindless deteriorating into fear, chaos and violence against an enemy does not exist in a world where global consent is hijacked to fight a war in search of weapons which were never there. Everybody Bend; Dont Talk, Dont See, Dont Hear. Gandhi said so.”

For Shilpa Gupta the project recalls a psychological technique in which a combination of healthy physical exercises can help in a slow and intense indoctrination of the mind by intense state military drills, local right-wing Hindu RSS cadre exercises or new-age courses to make one fighting fit.
The interactive loop keeps slipping into mindless violence that is no longer just a fashion but becomes internalized, morphing the emptied vulnerable self into a vessel for the projection of violence toward the state. Or as Shilpa Gupta, quoting Arundhati Roy, puts it, “‘You could say terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war. They are people who don’t believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.”
Johan Pijnappel

• Shilpa Gupta was born in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. She studied sculpture at the Sir J.J. School of Fine Arts, Mumbai. While still a student, she started public participation projects with local communities that used printed matter, telephone messages and shop interiors in a manner that recalled shopping mall events. In these, she cynically targeted. the commercialization that was on a huge upswing in India’s rapidly globalizing economy. In 2000 Gupta initiated Aarpaar, a public art exchange project between India and Pakistan. She gained international attention with installations includingYour Kidney Supermarket (2002) and Blessed Canvases (2002) and web sites such as Diamonds and You (2000), sentimentexpress.com (2001), and blessed-bandwith. net (2003), which was commissioned by the Tate Modern. Like her other works, these focused on the issue of global inequality. Although she often exhibits abroad, she has also created a number of new local projects and workshops in which she engages with a larger public. In 2003 she started the Video Art Road Show, which included several presentations in Mumbai and New Delhi in shopping malls and markets in the suburbs, and has shown her installations and video in street shops. Over the years, Gupta has been honored with several awards, such as the Sanskriti Award in India and the Transmediale (2004) in Berlin. Her projects in 2006 are for the Havana, Sydney and Liverpool Biennials as well as for a solo show at the Bose Pacia Gallery in New York. Shilpa Gupta lives and-works in Mumbai.
• Johan Pijnappel is an art historian/curator born in 1958 in Gendt, the Netherlands. In the late 1980s he was part of the artists’ collective that realized the second Art of Peace Biennial under the name Art Meets Science and Spirituality in a Changing Economy at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1990. In the early 1990s he wrote and edited a series of publications, such as Fluxus – Yesterday and Today, World Wide Video, Art & Technology and Marina Abramovic – Cleaning the
  Body, for Academy Editions in London. In the second half of the 1990s he worked as co-curator of the World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam. His interest in Asian video art resulted in his serving a curatorial residency in 1999-2000 at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Since he began living in India in 2000, his devotion to the video art of this country has resulted in a number of exhibitions and articles. His first book
  on the subject appeared in 2002. Most of his international curatorial projects since 2000 have aimed at creating dialogues within Asia. His latest exhibitions were Indian Video Art: History in Motion, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (2004); CC: Crossing Currents – Video Art and Cultural Identity, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2004); the Third Seoul International Media Art Biennale, Seoul Modern Art Museum (2004– 2005) and Tiger Lives: Asian Electronic Rituals for the 21st Century, Asia Society New York (2006). A Ph.D. candidate at the University of Leiden, he is presently working on his thesis, “Memory: Record/ Erase – Imaging Truth and Desire in Indian Video Art.”