The awarding of the Possehl-Prize for International Art 2025 to Shilpa Gupta is not merely an accolade, but the celebration of one of the most urgent and conceptually penetrating voices in the contemporary art scene. The Indian artist, born in 1976 and based in Mumbai, inaugurates her first significant solo museum exhibition in Germany on this occasion: “we last met in the mirror”, hosted at the Kunsthalle St. Annen in Lübeck. The exhibition, which brings together approximately twenty-five works created over two decades, takes the form of a profound meditation on the fluidity of meaning and the changing nature of definitions in a world in constant dislocation. The title itself alludes to the perceptual dislocation that is the leitmotif of Gupta’s work. The encounter with the artwork is not a simple observation, but a confrontation with the image of oneself filtered by an external reality, which is always negotiable.
Shilpa Gupta, “Still They Know Not WhatI Dream”, 2021, installation view, motion flapboards 35 min. (loop), 2 parts: 23 x 237 x 12.5 cm each, Kunsthalle St. Annen, 2025, Courtesy: the artist and neugerriemschneider, © Shilpa Gupta, Photo: André Leisner
The focal core of Shilpa Gupta’s research is the investigation of the word, conceived as unstable matter, a vibrant body capable of acting, wounding or protecting. Her art unfolds as a mental landscape where language loses its instrumental function to transform into pure experience, not describing the world, but radically challenging it. The artist operates on the subtle threshold between visibility and erasure, between presence and obfuscation. This dialectic manifests urgently in her investigation of censorship and the repression of power. The artist does not confine herself to an act of mere denunciation; rather, she exposes the architectures of coercion and restores their poetic residue. This tension between silencing and the survival of the verb is dramatically embodied in works such as For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017-18).
Shilpa Gupta, “Stars on Flags of the World”, 2012/2023, installation view, stars cast in wax in proportion to the volume of artist’s body, dimensions variable, Kunsthalle St. Annen, 2025, Courtesy: the artist, © Shilpa Gupta, Photo: André Leisner
A hundred microphones hang silently above text sheets pierced by metal points, evoking the verses of poets imprisoned or persecuted for what they wrote. The voices overlap, chase each other and fragment. The word survives, even when silenced. The Lübeck exhibition also includes works that carry forward this battle against state and social control, such as Spoken Poem in a Bottle (2018), which collects texts by banned authors from different centuries, and the installation Untitled (2018-2023), also dedicated to the theme of the denied word. Language, in Gupta’s hands, is configured as a veritable battlefield where incessant memory and control clash.
Shilpa Gupta, “Untitled (Spoken Poem in a Bottle)”, 2018- ongoing, installation view, wood, glass bottles, light bulbs, 174 x 331.5 x 30.5 cm, Kunsthalle St. Annen, 2025, courtesy: the artist and neugerriemschneider, © Shilpa Gupta, photo: André Leisner
Gupta’s research is profoundly nourished by observations of the complex reality of Mumbai, a microcosm of social inequality, post-colonial fractures and global dynamics, which immediately shifts to universal issues. The theme of the border emerges as a key concept, explored in its geographical, ideological and psychological manifestations. The artist, born in Mumbai in 1976, merges observations rooted in the Indian subcontinent with universal inquiries. The artist makes the border tangible and fragile simultaneously through minimal objects and measurements that are, nonetheless, dense with meaning. For example, the neon sculpture 2652 maps the religious tension of Jerusalem by translating the steps between the Wailing Wall, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre into a number. Elsewhere, the work 1:14.9 (2011/12) materializes the fenced border between India and Pakistan into a sculpture made of a wrapped ball of thread, an elastic material that evokes its precariousness and illusory solidity.
Shilpa Gupta, “I Live Under Your Sky Too”, 2004 – ongoing, installation view, time-based light installation, 434 x 991 cm, Kunsthalle St. Annen, 2025, Courtesy: the artist and neugerriemschneider, © Shilpa Gupta, photo: André Leisner
With the installation Stars on Flags of the World, the artist challenges preconceived notions of affiliation by inviting visitors to take wax stars from mute flags, a subtle and poetically subversive gesture against rigid nationalist symbols. This research is based on the conviction that art must translate global issues into a universal language. Gupta’s multidisciplinary approach, embracing installations, sculptures, sound works and video, culminates in an invitation to the viewer for an empathetic confrontation, as in the sound work I have many dreams (2007-2008), where the voices of young girls narrating their desires for the future demonstrate the universality of adolescent hopes.
Shilpa Gupta, “I have many dreams”, 2007 – 08, installation view, archival print on canvas, sound, 4 parts, each 168 x 137 cm, Kunsthalle St. Annen, 2025, courtesy: the artist, © Shilpa Gupta, photo: André Leisner
The exhibition finds particular resonance in its Lübeck venue. The Kunsthalle St. Annen is a unique architectural space, erected on the site of the former Augustinian monastery church, where the contemporary prismatic structure meets and incorporates the historical ruins. This dialogue between the modern and the stratification of the past aligns perfectly with Gupta’s art, which works through stratification and implication, creating zones of interrogation rather than illustrations. The Possehl Prize, endowed with 25,000 euros, is awarded by the Possehl Foundation, an institution born from the will of its founder, Emil Possehl, who says: «the fruits of my life’s work should benefit my beloved hometown» (Lübeck). The Foundation is dedicated to recognizing groundbreaking representatives of international contemporary art for their work, with the explicit goal of building bridges culturally and thematically between Lübeck and the world. Gupta’s work, with its socio-political sensitivity and vast range of formal expressions, perfectly embodies this vision, offering the German public the opportunity to reflect on their own experiences in the mirror of global developments.
Shilpa Gupta, “Listening Air”, 2019-2022, installation view, multi-channel sound installation, speakers, microphones, lights, printed text on metal stands, Kunsthalle St. Annen, 2025, courtesy: the artist and neugerriemschneider, © Shilpa Gupta, photo: André Leisner
Ultimately, Shilpa Gupta’s work does not console, but disorients. It does not provide definitive answers, but stimulates the observer to an exercitium of listening and sensory dislocation. Its strength lies in its ability to bring forth the political urgency of the invisible through minimal forms and eloquent silences. The artist reverses the discourse, inviting the spectator to an empathetic confrontation with the other. Faced with the pervasive external and internal conditioning, Gupta’s work poses an inescapable question, one that resonates as a conceptual mantra: not “this is the meaning”, but “Are you willing to get lost?”. It is in this vertigo that lies the supreme act of an art that amplifies existence and becomes a sensory presence that overturns meaning, seeing, hearing, and speaking without negation
Info:
Shilpa Gupta. We last met in the mirror
27/09/2025 – 01/03/2026
Kunsthalle St. Annen
Possehl Prize for International Art 2025
Beckergrube 38-52, Lübeck (DE)
kunsthalle-st-annen.de
Art Curator and Art Advisor, graduated in Visual Arts and Cultural Mediation, with Master in Curatorial Practices, born in 1995, lives in Naples. He collaborates with Galleries and Independent Spaces, his research is mainly focused on Emerging Painting, with a careful and inclined gaze also on other forms of aesthetic language.
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