The Botín Centre in Santander was born with the disadvantage of privilege. Like those handsome men who almost no one takes for clever and who have to work three times as hard to prove their worth, Renzo Piano’s building is a victim of its own landscape: who wants to see contemporary art exhibitions when you have the bay right there, with its boats coming in and out of the port and those green hills reflected in the blue water? It is not strange that many tourists use the museum as a watchtower and viewing point and do not even notice the collection. I myself, when faced with some rather arid or inane exhibition, have preferred to turn my back on the paintings and spend time looking out of the windows, counting little boats and enjoying the sun in one of the most charming urban-natural landscapes on the Peninsula. When you think about it, the location could also be a blessing: no matter how much you dislike the art on display, the bay calms you down. It is impossible to leave there in a bad mood.
What I mean by this is that the programmers at the Centro Botín have a much more difficult task than those at other similar institutions: their content has to be superb, incontestable and hypnotic, so that visitors turn their gaze to the works and stop contemplating the Cantabrian watercolour. Perhaps that is why this season they have turned to Shilpa Gupta, an Indian artist who is presenting herself in Spain for the first time. Her exhibition I live under your sky too It occupies the second floor of the museum and is one of the best plans for those who live or pass through Santander and its surroundings. It would even justify a trip to the city. You have until September 9th.
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Gupta knocks out the visitor with an efficiency and simplicity bordering on the naive. With minimal, poor and recycled materials, she induces a restlessness and an ambiguous and uncomfortable emotion very similar to religious awe. One enters as a tourist, a banal stroller who kills time until lunchtime and a distracted observer of the ships that face the bow of the port of Santander, and leaves in pain and frustrated, as if one’s soul had been beaten. One of the last pieces of the exhibition is a wax sheet that formed part of a mould of the artist’s body, which she dismantled and pressed, in a metaphor of what political repression does to the bodies of dissidents. That’s how one feels when leaving, like those wax sheets.
Shilpa Gupta, at her exhibition at the Botín Centre in Santander.BENITO’S BELEN (Botín Center)
I do not mean to dissuade those who are squeamish about escapism or those who go to contemporary art museums like someone who spends a day at Disneyland Paris, entertained by more or less amusing occurrences. One of Gupta’s virtues is that he reaches out to everyone. His art has such a radically democratic vocation that it only demands from the public their senses. There are no rules, just seeing and listening.
The central work of this kind of anthology by Shilpa Gupta —which collects art from different periods— is an installation titled Listening Air. The visitor opens the curtains and enters what can only be interpreted as a sacred place. The darkness is almost total, except for a few lamps with low-intensity bulbs that illuminate music stands with the lyrics of several popular protest songs in different languages. Microphones supported by pulleys move around the room. The microphones have been modified to function as speakers through which the same songs are played a cappella and by several voices. Some chairs invite listening. No one speaks. No one murmurs. No one looks at their cell phone. Gupta achieves here what almost no one achieves in the age of distraction: absolute attention.
Shilpa Gupta exhibition at the Botín Centre in Santander.BENITO’S BELEN (Botín Center)
It is touching to see this anguish in visitors, but much more surprising is to feel how it affects you yourself. There are some songs so popular that they go beyond the cliché, like the They will not move us (Spanish quota that was not in the original 2019 installation) or the Hello beautiful. Even those, which some of us cannot listen to without a grimace of party-going irony, pinch the spirit. But it is Hum Dekhenge that completely disarms you. Perhaps because its words are incomprehensible, and the voice of Mansi Multani —a very famous Indian singer and actress— turns it into a chant or an invocation of no one knows exactly what, but which has to do with primal dignity, which no one can bend.
We will see is a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, something like the national poet of Pakistan, adored by millions of Indians and Pakistanis on both sides of a border that Gupta finds painful because it is arbitrary. In 2019, its musical version became the anthem of the student protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, considered a discriminatory and racist measure by Hindu fundamentalists against the rest of the religions and ethnicities of India. In Gupta’s work, it is the resistance of individuals to the imposition of an authoritarian identity.
Shilpa Gupta exhibition at the Botín Centre in Santander.BENITO’S BELEN (Botín Center)
The power and fragility of words against repression is the theme of a series of twenty drawings framed in simple wood with vertical strips running vertically down the centre, covering part of the drawing and evoking the bars of a cell. In all the scenes, someone is missing: there is a gap in the shape of a human silhouette representing poets who have been repressed for their verses. There are historical ones, from the Middle Ages to many of today’s poets, including Soviet poets and victims of former totalitarian regimes. The poster reproduces some verses by the authors mentioned, which are part of an investigation into poets from around the world who have suffered censorship and punishment.
Gupta’s exposition conveys a consistent fragility. Words are weak, mutable, easily erased or silenced. They are quickly broken and forgotten, and those who speak and write them disappear into the mud of history. But at the same time, they contain a mystical and almost magical power, the power of protest songs presented as prayers to who knows what god. Perhaps to none at all. Songs that do not even base their power on the improbable harm they do to the satraps, but on the self-esteem they give to the community that sings them fraternally. Listening to them, one gets the feeling that, even in defeat, these dissidents were invincible.
To say that the filtered light of the Cantabrian Sea hurts the eyes when you go out is to say very little. Almost all of that prosperous happiness of a European city offends the inflamed senses of the visitor. Even the laughter of the children running through the marine park that extends at the foot of the Botín Centre seems to mock what one has just experienced. It is not the fault of the children, nor of Santander, nor of anyone. But one cannot return to the distracted life of summer without taking a few minutes to reaccustom one’s eyes and ears to the banality of the sea.
Shilpa Gupta exhibition at the Botín Centre in Santander.BENITO’S BELEN (Botín Center)
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