Sculpting Truth with Shilpa Gupta: The artist's ambitious show in Berlin is a cross-generational dialogue

On a drizzly Tuesday afternoon recently, I found myself in Berlin—at the historic entrance of Hamburger Bahn­hof: Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. I was looking for What Still Holds, billed as Mumbai-based Shilpa Gupta’s big­gest show in Germany. Before heading there, I was momentarily distracted by artist and musician Lina Lapelyte’s participatory public artwork, which greets visitors as they step into the museum. As a former railway termi­nus, Hamburger Bahnhof has plenty of space within its cavernous bosom to accommodate artists of all stripes and their oversized, alchemistic visions of Gideon. The Lithuania-born Lapelyte has transformed the central exhibi­tion hall into a playground, having scattered 4,00,000 wooden cubes on the floor which people are free to arrange and rearrange into seemingly endless configurations.

30 May 2026