Upon entering the multi-channel work spread across, ‘Untitled’ (2006), the viewer is surrounded by a sea of numbers - the official and the unofficial, being stitched onto clothes which have been hung out to dry. These are the numbers of the people declared missing, those by the government and contradictory numbers, of those being remembered and mourned by the people. The numbers are projected onto the garments meant for those gone missing – some to wrap and tie the body if it returned without any life, some garments were amputated and some had even overgrown limbs; some with scars, have been stitched and re-stitched sometimes along with fallen hair caught in the threads.

Walking past the hung garments, unfolded another segment, of a projection upon a pencil drawing on the floor. Here a single woman, wearing one of the hung garments, is viewed from above as if, playing a game like hopscotch on map lines. The woman moves hopping across the floor casting and picking up a stone – representing a fragment of a ground that stands contested. In the audio, her voice is interrupted with the sound of stones falling on the ground, engulfing the space. One hears, ‘The inches, the feet, the kilometres…the markings you have made on this land have increased the distance so much.’ Upon moving further into the work, in an emblematic circular video projection, marches an anti-thesis of the national symbol. The woman reappears here, marching, saluting to the wind, dressed in the same white garment which also hangs from the staff of a flag – as if, no flag is made without the dead.

Writes theorist, Nancy Adajania, “Gupta lets various psychic discontents spill over into a convulsive madness. Her empathy and sense of horror at injustice escalates to the point of near-hysterical identification with Kashmiri women whose husbands have disappeared without a trace or are languishing in prison, during the continuing low-intensity conflict between Indian forces, Kashmiri militants and Pakistan-supported mercenaries. In this work, the artist wears the shrouds of missing Kashmiri men and performs a mock Republic Day parade, which can be read as a funeral procession for a nation whose ideals have died.”