100 Steps

Material: slate stone, carving on stone

Shilpa Gupta's works revolve around the basic element of artistic expression, that is perception. Either through photography, videos, sculptures, installations, or internet-based projects, her main interest is to play with the different options offered by the used medium (text, images, sound, objects) to convey and receive a message. Gupta's work is thus open to a number of interpretations and understandings and operates at different levels, since it breathes and functions only when activated by a viewer which makes her work his own.

Perceptions are in fact the artist's deeper inspiration, the trigger through which she is able to come to terms with her own and everybody's life, to give a shape to the quotidian absurdities and dangers hiding in our acts.

The themes she develops are those affecting our everyday lives, our human condition: desire, the physical and perceived body, its definitions and the space that it inhabits which comes infused with social and historical rudiments. Born in 1976, she lives and works in Mumbai, India where she has studied sculpture at the Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts from 1992 to 1997.

 

Along the Sorigil Pathway, 100 Steps takes the visitor on a poetic rendition, a sort of initiation, a journey through our perception of time, space and our body to a re-defined everyday life. The carved stones define a path that is both outward and inward, leading the walkers to the Temple and to themselves at once, whilst the inscribed sentences urge them to establish a deep connection, almost an identification between their body and the surrounding site.