Shilpa Gupta’s 6,10.3,2 evokes an understanding of experiential distance and presence while focusing on how qualitative interruptions and subjective internality interact with the otherwise external and durational nature of time; ‘6’ refers to the minimum social distance to be maintained in feet, ‘10.3’ refers to the same distance as measured by Gupta’s palm, and ‘2’ is its conversion into metres. These recent works explore the over-intensification of individual emotions resultant from the unexpected and in some ways ongoing lockdown due to the global pandemic. Through a series of sensory objects, she explores the frenzy of immobility as well as the density of acquiescence both emerging from a circumstantially cultivated, heightened sensitivity.

For Gupta, who is interested in the cognitive interventions and alterations that take place across spatial and conceptual boundaries, internal faculties are negotiated within the tension individuals experience in their situationships with the outside world. These mediations can encompass broader feelings of emptiness – as examined by the rotating knife on a pedestal whose constricted, repetitive passions are in-laid with a furious energy – as well as capture the intimacy of reflection, as evoked by the mirror sculpture that acknowledges the internal seer, the eye seeing the eye, in an activated gesture of recognition and prompted realization. Gupta includes a foot mould personified by a weighty character that embraces these ranging tenets of the truth of experience, equally a sense of turning away as a sense of calm of being with the wall, exemplifying an inevitable vestigiality that accompanies a lack of movement. In her split frame photographs, Gupta also explores negotiations with time, whose tepid unendingness is in sharp contrast to the lesser, curtailed movements of staying indoors, which when measured through physical imaginations by the hand or body reveals dissentions as interconnections, as shadows and light.