With “Shilpa Gupta. we last met in the mirror”, the Kunsthalle St. Annen is presenting a major solo exhibition by the internationally renowned artist for the first time in Germany. Gupta, the most recent winner of the Possehl Prize for International Art, uses a variety of artistic media — from robotic works and sound videos to performative installations — and deals intensively with issues of social belonging, security, censorship, religion and freedom of expression. The border complex in particular is at the centre of her work. For over two decades, Gupta has been investigating how borders drawn by states shape social, geographical and psychological environments. Her works reflect on how power structures, language and identity work in border areas, creating references to the conceptual art of the 1960s, but expanding them to include global, non-Eurocentric perspectives.
With her exhibition in Lübeck, Shilpa Gupta links global issues with local experiences and invites visitors to reflect on universal themes such as belonging, identity and the power of art. The Kunsthalle’s activities — such as dialogue-based tours and philosophical workshops for children — enable a lively exchange on the meaning of borders and open up new perspectives for joint reflection on the present and future. Lübeck as a former border region, with its historical and current relationships with its neighbours, thus becomes the setting for an artistic reflection that celebrates social diversity and border crossings.
