Art Basel 2024: Now You See Me | Sunil Gupta

Messe Basel Messeplatz 10 4058 Basel Switzerland 11 - 16 June 2024 
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Messe Basel Messeplatz 10 4058 Basel Switzerland Hall 2, Booth D11 https://www.artbasel.com/basel

The curation includes a collection of vintage prints from three important series in Gupta’s oeuvre –

London 1982, Lovers: Ten Years On and Exiles – photographed and produced over the 1980s in

London, England, and Delhi, India. This special curation divulges the oppressive cultural apparatuses

within which sub-cultures were overpowered and rendered invisible in the throes of mainstream

society in London and Delhi in the 1980s. Whether visualizing the issue of invisible sub-cultures in

London or the manufactured absence of gay Indian men, Gupta’s approach to the public site and its

impact on private experiences raises interesting points of similarity and difference between two

historically connected countries and their social sciences. England’s colonization of India left the latter

with a kind of Victorian cultural hangover, where the act of labelling, of naming and shaming, has

been promulgated for generations. Gupta notes the ruptures in such a shared legacy, drawing a

parallel between the anxiety, oppression and threat of exposure in London with the more liminal yet

equally insecure experience in Delhi in the 1980s. 

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