Often engaging with modes of transmission and amplification, We Are Closer Than You Ever Imagined, is the third from the series of flapboards which the artist has been working with since 2008. Returning to objects that inhabit entry–exit zones interrupting or flagging passage through borders and territory, Gupta’s turn to the flapboard, used traditionally to announce arrivals and departures, sets up a paradoxical experience of passive interaction. Invoking the ephemerality as well as cyclicality of longing, fulfillment and wait, typically associated with states of transition and change, the characters on the board display generate a series of short lines that change every few seconds eventually following a philosophical pattern, based on intuitive logic, that the viewer can speculate. The message is playful and portentous meditating on the something ‘as is’ as well as how it ‘is not’; for example, a poetic fragment announces ‘a confession’ immediately undercutting it as ‘not a confession’, and similarly the ‘now’ becomes the ‘not now’, etc. With these whimsical schematics, even in how many spellings are rendered, Gupta asks the viewer to rely on a hopeful intuition, to question the expected and understand the unexpected, which is often how the ‘other’ appears to us, in conversation with ourselves. As with some of her other works Gupta is concerned with the narcissism of seeing and cognition, and how constructed perceptions about the world are taken for granted as knowledge.