Sound entered Shilpa Gupta’s practice early. Her first sound piece, made in 2001, collected sexual and racist slurs overheard between strangers. Two decades on, that same fascination has deepened, turning toward how voices endure, migrate, and survive in her latest installation Listening Air. Presented at the Kochi Biennale with lead support from the RMZ Foundation, the exhibition unfolds as a constellation of sound installations, kinetic objects, and participatory elements that resist spectacle. Microphones are turned inside out—made to speak rather than listen. Objects usually associated with recording become a source of sound. Words float, collide, dissolve. “I am drawn to how sound emerges and enters the interiors of our being,” Gupta says. “Carried through the air and settling under the skin. It can pierce and hum.”
The voices you encounter are travellers. Bella Ciao moves from the women rice-weeders of Italy’s Po Valley in the late 19th century to the farmers’ sit-down protests in Delhi in 2020. We Shall Overcome, once sung by tobacco-farm workers in South Carolina, journeys through the Civil Rights movement, Tiananmen Square, and beyond. Hum Dekhenge, written by Faiz Ahmed Faiz in 1979, crosses borders to echo across Indian university campuses during moments of unrest. No Nos Moverán carries the histories of Mexican migrants and farmworker unions across continents. “This constellation of voices, crossing time, language, and place, invites visitors into a shared act of listening,” Gupta says. “They resonate with resistance to power, and with the persistence of memory and hope.”
Gupta’s practice circles questions of classification and control—how objects are labelled, identities are fixed, borders are enforced, and silence is produced. “I am interested in how silence can carry weight, how absence itself can become a form of resistance, and the tension between personal agency and collective experience,” she says.
Listening Air disperses rather than concludes, allowing each fragment of sound to retain its own trajectory. What Gupta constructs is an ever-shifting space—one where voices meet, separate, and return, carrying their histories with them.