Kanchana Gupta: Beyond the limits of Matter and Technique

Kanchana Gupta approaches her artistic practice as she does her corporate career. Whether she’s collaborating with film crews for her video works or industrial painters and steel fabricators to produce ‘paintings’ of everyday tarpaulins, her work is always grounded in conceptual thinking and collaborative processes.

By Lourdes Abela Samson

Kanchana Gupta brings into her artistic practice an emphasis on hard work and collaboration that draws from her experience of working as a human resource leader in multinational companies. This disciplined approach, which has enabled her to successfully navigate between the demands of corporate life and her creative pursuits, finds expression in her willingness to take on the physical and technical demands of her painting practice, while concurrently working on the production of a new series of video works. During the first two months of 2022, the India-born and Singapore-based multidisciplinary artist impressively opened two well-received shows, presenting her tarpaulin-inspired paintings at Folded, Pierced, Stretched at Gillman Barracks in January during Singapore Art Week, and her triptych of video works at the two-woman show, While She Quivers, with Dr. Yanyun Chen at the Objectifs Centre for Film and Photography a month later.

In Folded, Pierced, Stretched, her second solo show with Sullivan+Strumpf in Singapore, Gupta takes on the aesthetic and symbolic language embedded in the industrial material, tarpaulin. Used widely in construction sites, tarpaulin’s ubiquitous presence in urban landscapes is often associated with notions of temporariness, disposability, and migrant labour. In recontextualising tarpaulin paintings within a gallery space, Gupta consciously challenges the value, materiality, and ‘low culture’ associated with this plastic fabric and subtly alludes to the sensitive social issue of migration and the plight of migrant workers in Singapore. ‘By appropriating a material considered as trash and from the fringe and presenting it in a white cube space’, she explains, ‘I attempt to ask questions about the hierarchy of artistic materials and representation’. 1

As in her previous series of paintings in Traces and Residues, Singapore, 2017, and 458.32 Square Meters, Singapore, 2019, Gupta’s trademark process of creating layered paintings out of textured oil paint skins forms the foundation, on which this current series is developed. Consisting of about 50 layers of stacked oil skins, this painting base is first strengthened with a canvas support. To achieve an almost perfect representation of tarpaulin,

Gupta collaborated closely with several industrial partners, including a local printer that screen printed the familiar grid pattern and colours of tarpaulin onto the base of oil paint skins, a tarpaulin shop that hemmed the edges and added the metal eyelets, a steel factory that custom-designed the metal frames, and migrant workers who stretched and hung the works onto the frames with steel suspension cables. While they closely resemble the industrial material of tarpaulin, these paintings which were created through laborious and collaborative artistic processes, subvert the very material that they mimic by embodying notions of labour, materiality and value on the opposite side of the spectrum.

Kanchana Gupta FOLDED, PIERCED, STRETCHED #002 : Blue White Blue (detail), 2021 Oil paint skins with silk screen printing ,Galvanised steel frame, steel eyelets and suspension cable 182 x 202 cm Photo: Jing Wei

Approaching her video practice with the same attitude, Gupta collaborated with film crews in India and Singapore to develop her video series, Production of Desire. Her current presentation at the Chapel Gallery of Objectifs Centre for Film and Photography focuses on the trope of feminine desirability perpetuated by the Bollywood films of the 1980s and 1990s, to question frameworks of femininity. For Gupta, this was a deeply personal project that became a way for her to unpack how this fantasy image of Indian femininity and desirability may have affected the self-image and self-worth of young women of her generation. ‘My current series of video works dissects the construct of this overtly sexualised presentation of the female body

Installation View of Kanchana Gupta, While She Quivers, Objectifs - Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore 2022, featuring Production of Desire, 2021 single channel video installation. Photo: Joseph Nair

and probes the agency and empowerment of cinema’, she says. 2 Removed from the original cinematic context by the silence and the openness of the gallery space, the sensual choreography and suggestive settings border on the absurd. Gupta adopts various female personas in these videos, from a coy and submissive virgin to an aging woman or a widow who shaves her head to prevent other men from desiring her, and finally, to a modern heroine who confidently meets the camera’s gaze. Gupta underscores that in these narratives, the performer and the camera are complicit in creating the fantasy of seduction that eventually leads to consummation in a few dance sequences. In her deliberate appropriation of this gendered stereotype, Gupta critically engages with the male gaze behind the lens. While recognising the influence of this gaze and the patriarchy within this narrative, Gupta ultimately reclaims for the female performer the power and agency to determine the way she is portrayed.

Both exhibitions reveal how Gupta’s artistic practice is strongly grounded in conceptual thinking and collaborative processes. By approaching her artistic practice as she does her corporate career, Gupta is able to take risks that allow her to expand her practice further and to find solutions to her artistic challenges. Her versatility as an artist is perhaps best explained by independent researcher and curator Savita Apte: ‘Gupta strives to take her art beyond the limits of matter and technique: in order to engage critically with meaning, she processes reality and supersedes it’.