Humans once believed Earth was the natural center of the universe, with the Sun, planets and stars orbiting around it. For centuries, many civilizations maintained the conviction that god was orchestrating the cosmos, and a few elite individuals—kings or spiritual guides—had been chosen to act on their behalf on Earth. The Roman Empire, for a long time, was believed to be undefeatable, destined to expand without limit and rule the globe. But over time, the geocentric model was subverted by new knowledge, traditional religions faced sweeping scrutiny and most historical empires collapsed under their own weight. If we look at the course of human civilization in perspective, many so-called secular truths and orders have been similarly questioned, overturned and dissolved—exposing the inherent arbitrariness in all ideological constructions.
For decades, the Indian artist Shilpa Gupta has addressed these themes: how cultural identity—both individual and collective—is established and how shifting notions or “truths” shape it. In pursuing this challenging investigation, the artist has consistently employed a minimalist vocabulary that distills complex meanings into a few incisive poetic fragments of image, sound, environments and atmosphere—both precise and open-ended. Silence and contemplation are at the core of Gupta’s practice and artistic strategy. She invites the viewer to go beyond the surface of the aesthetic presentation, prompting a deeper engagement with both the work and its underlying message. In contrast to the exuberance that often characterizes Indian art, Gupta instead pares her presentations down to their essence: artworks as the bone structure of a concept, aesthetic epigrams dense with meaning that demand time and focused observation as they slowly unfold to the senses and the mind.
For her debut Los Angeles exhibition, “Some Suns Fell Off,” which opened during Frieze L.A. at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, the artist assembled a group of compelling visual and installation works that transform ephemeral elements—light, sound and symbols—into metaphors capable of carrying broad societal and political messages. The exhibition’s title appears in the split-flap display work Sound on My Skin, a fragmented poetic flow of evocative phrases in constant transit. The classic mechanical Solari board, once used in airports and train stations to announce arrivals and departures, makes a nostalgic return here, functioning as a reminder of the fleeting nature of events and information. “This 30-minute piece moves through various internal and external constructions, from symbols, rules and notices to verbal utterances, love, power, fear, hate and truth,” Gupta told Observer. “The title ‘Some Suns Fell Off’ refers to symbols on flags—such as stars, stripes and suns—that seem to have fallen off, perhaps due to their weight.”
As in all of this artist’s exhibitions, the audience becomes an active element of the work, invited to navigate shifting cryptic messages in the way one might approach a poem. This requires taking the time to pause, observe or listen to phenomenological experiences that only emerge through sustained engagement with both medium and message. The artist invites the viewer to become part of a process of critical examination rather than a passive acceptor of surface-level truths.
“This comes from my own experience where—sometimes by chance or sometimes deliberately, having found myself looking at the same construct from another place—a new narrative emerges,” Gupta reflected. “It might be slightly different or even rather contradictory, which forces me to relook and rework what I had known and how I had known it. This process can be frustrating, rewarding and sometimes even unsettling. Perhaps this is why I am drawn to near-distant relationships, where the focal points change and one walks together with the audience—turning around and swiveling together.”
Nationalism, religious fundamentalism, social identity and political polarization are themes Gupta has frequently addressed in her work. They manifest here with renewed resonance as the exhibition opened in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. election. The large American flag featured in the decades-spanning work Stars on Flags of the World, July 2011 seems to question the durability of both the symbol and the nation it represents. The stars appear as fleeting signs of an American dream that has steadily revealed itself as less promising, exposing the fragile foundations of a country reckoning with its own ideals. “Stars on the Flags of the World is an ongoing work started in 2012,” Gupta said. “Now in 2025, it has been particularly compelling to present this body of work in the U.S. at a critical moment.”
SEE ALSO: Art Market Insights – 2024 Saw More Transactions But Fewer Record-Setting Sales
Another work, 100 Hand-drawn Maps of USA (2008/2023), interrogates the nation’s self-awareness—its understanding of its own vast, diverse and deeply fragmented territory. Pages of a notebook turn slowly in the air, pushed by the current of a fan, revealing imagined outlines and shifting interpretations of a national shape that remains elusive. For this project, Gupta invited 100 individuals of various ages and backgrounds living in the United States to draw the country’s outline purely from memory. “This is an ongoing series that started in 2008 with a book of one hundred blank pages—I asked those around me, my family, friends, visitors to the studio and beyond from different backgrounds, to each draw a map of India from memory,” she said. “None of the maps match. The work questions how political borders are created, imagined and learned. States are forgotten, misshaped or incorporated into others, highlighting the disparity between the private and the public, between the singular state-sanctioned cartography and the informal image of one’s country that one carries in mind.”
Reintroducing this project into the context of today’s United States is a way of underscoring urgent questions about national identity—its physical, cultural, economic and political dimensions—at a fraught political moment. Yet Gupta’s reflection reaches beyond American concerns. Her work addresses the mounting geopolitical fragility across the globe, as countries worldwide confront renewed tensions around nationalism—oscillating between idealization, extremism and escapism, often depending on how consciously they engage with the complexities of the past.
The nation-state construct has long been a subject of deep interest for Gupta. “I grew up in a city that dreamt of being cosmopolitan and woke up to the nightmare of riots—a coastal city that has been a commercial center in the region of South Asia, which was partitioned on the basis of religion several decades ago and still continues to bleed. Having traversed the border areas in the north and east, the nation-state looks very different from its center.”
Gupta’s Map Tracings further emphasizes the arbitrariness of the nation-state—also in its visual representation, a precarious and often random form defined by artificially imposed borders. Twisting a copper pipe into a three-dimensional linear sculpture, the work outlines the U.S.’s geopolitical form as something familiar yet clearly artificial and inherently fragile.
Over the years, different versions of 100 Hand Drawn Maps of My Country have given Gupta insights into stories in which the fragility of the nation-state has unfolded in varied contexts. “As a construct, the nation-state is relatively young compared to communities that have existed far longer,” she said. The body of work in the show engages with the process of constructing national identity—a process that inevitably involves a dynamic interplay of historical, cultural, political and social forces. Depending on their colonial or political past, nations construct identity through the elevation of historical events, mythologies and shared experiences. But a process of “selective memory” often intervenes—some histories are glorified, others forgotten or rewritten to better suit prevailing national narratives. More importantly, the very idea of the nation belongs to a symbolic realm held together by shared symbols, a linguistic system and a codified legal structure.
In that work as in others, Gupta investigates the mechanisms through which truth is established—but also distorted and manipulated. In this sense, her art becomes a space and tool for exercising critical thought, beginning with the senses and extending into a poetic and conceptual examination of reality—moving beyond the veil of received truths disseminated by media. “What we know is often about what we see, what is shown and who is in the position to show us,” she said. “These routes are often in the hands of large structures which have their own agenda. This differs from what individuals depict, be it writers, poets or artists who attempt to see and show the world and its complexities.”
In response, the artist addresses censorship and removed truths—prompting reflection on how political construction can evolve into systems of control and repression. In a series of delicate drawings titled Nothing Will Go On Record, Gupta removes the outlines of human figures—suggesting the erasure and silencing of censored voices obscured within the labyrinthine mechanics of bureaucratic systems. Similarly exploring absence, one installation places a lone voice at a standing microphone in a darkened room reciting the names of 100 poets from different countries and eras along with the years they were detained and incarcerated by their respective states. The result is a powerful audio monument to censorship and the systematic erasure of those who speak outside sanctioned truths.
Ultimately, Gupta’s artistic practice is an invitation to move beyond the over-mediated images that populate our screens. Engaging with the real world’s layered complexity, her work reflects the contradictions and ambiguities of today’s global condition—translating them into multisensorial metaphors that distill the fragmentary essence of both individual and collective human experience.
Shilpa Gupta’s “Some Suns Fell Off” is on view at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles through March 29, 2025.
<