When art blurs borders

Shilpa Gupta's work maps our collective imagination. It confronts the viewer with questions of nationhood and belonging

- PAYAL ARYA

Shilpa Gupta adapts her modes of working to fit each new work. The one I'd like to talk about, though, is 100 Hand Drawn Maps of My Country, an ongoing series that began in 2008. Gupta invites 100 people to draw the contours of their nations from memory. She then superimposes these 100 drawings upon each other, in blue over a white background, to create a composite map that is more telling precisely because it is inaccurate.