In Shilpa Gupta’s StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream (2021), two suspended flapboards deliver a frenzied stream of oracles. Their letters clatter nervously, forming brief, broken, and poetic, if not occasionally unsettling, messages—“MORE POWER / MORE FEAR,” “RAID HISTORIES / ERASE VOICES”—before the next alphabetical convulsion begins. The motion-based work was part of Gupta’s first solo exhibition of the year, “Lines of Flight” at the Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai, which exemplified the Mumbai-born artist’s interest in power structures that tacitly define and erode our existence—whether through technology, surveillance, demarcation, or language. 

Gupta had a busy year, taking part in more than a dozen international group exhibitions, unveiling a permanent light installation in Doha, and contributing to festivals in Canada, the UK, and Macao. In February, she was the subject of two solo shows: one at New Delhi’s Bikaner House, organized by Vadehra Art Gallery, and another at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Los Angeles, which addressed the long-contested borders of the Indian subcontinent. Titled “Some suns fell off,” the latter featured 1:7690 (2023), which compresses narratives of migration, political cartography, and bootleg resistance into a taut, hand-wound ball of clothing scraps smuggled from Bangladesh into India.