Shilpa Gupta, ‘For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit — 100 Jailed Poets’, Installation view at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation. In this work Shilpa Gupta expands on the artist’s investigations of political borderlines, and how they exist beyond maps to the invisible mechanisms of control and surveillance. The work is an installation of one-hundred speaking microphones that sit above corresponding stakes that each hold a page of poetry. Recitals of a different poet’s work emanate from each microphone in a synchronized chorus. All of the writers who are represented, some living decades or centuries ago, were imprisoned for their poetry or politics, and the installation gives voice to their forced silence. Incarceration instigates a physical boundary between prisoners and the free world. However ‘For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit — 100 Jailed Poets’, points to how orchestrated oppression is harder to detect as it renders those imprisoned voiceless and invisible.

Shilpa Gupta, ‘For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit — 100 Jailed Poets’, Installation view at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, Courtesy of Kochi Biennale Foundation. In this work Shilpa Gupta expands on the artist’s investigations of political borderlines, and how they exist beyond maps to the invisible mechanisms of control and surveillance. The work is an installation of one-hundred speaking microphones that sit above corresponding stakes that each hold a page of poetry. Recitals of a different poet’s work emanate from each microphone in a synchronized chorus. All of the writers who are represented, some living decades or centuries ago, were imprisoned for their poetry or politics, and the installation gives voice to their forced silence. Incarceration instigates a physical boundary between prisoners and the free world. However ‘For, In Your Tongue, I Can Not Fit — 100 Jailed Poets’, points to how orchestrated oppression is harder to detect as it renders those imprisoned voiceless and invisible.