About the Exhibition
Following Jerome Kugan’s two-part exploration of sexuality and liberation, the latest exhibition at The Back Room continues these themes from the feminine perspective and with a greater emphasis on the erotic. Desire Lines is the debut solo exhibition of Dipali Gupta, an artist born in Mumbai, India, educated in Singapore, and currently based in Kuala Lumpur. On show are a selection of paintings, video works, and lightbox installations made between 2019 to 2022. The works are investigations into the changing nature of female pleasure in the age of rapid technological advance and post-feminist attitudes towards female sexuality.
Upon entrance, the leftmost wall of the gallery shows a salon-style display of selected works from Dipali’s Pages from the Book of Spring series, in which the artist recreates 17th- and 18th-century Japanese ukiyo-e prints in the shunga genre, but with the human features replaced with lines created by vibrators dipped in ink. The right side of the gallery presents a quasi-domestic setting furnished with a television and lounge chairs for viewers to watch a loop of videos from Dipali’s O HER! series, which pays homage to the vanitas tradition of still life paintings.
Whether borrowing from Japanese shunga or Dutch vanitas still lifes, sampling in order to subvert is a characteristic of Dipali’s art and writing. Thus is the title of the exhibition, Desire Lines, taken from the architectural term for paths in a landscape paved by walkers off the demarcated route, traces of inhabitants’ intuition and familiarity that shapes a landscape better than any architectural design imposed from above. Dipali’s art trudges the paths laid before her by previous artists and thinkers, but spirals off into a journey that is uniquely her own.
About the Artist
Dipali Gupta (b. 1977, Mumbai, India) is a multidisciplinary artist who explores society’s constructs and contradictions from the angle of the feminine. She received her BA in Fine Arts from Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore, in 2018, winning the Chan Davies Art Prize for her series, Her Pleasure. Her concerns and research span Foucauldian biopolitics, Deleuzian societies of control, religious habits, socio-political dogmas, and psychosomatic effects. Her art attempts to interrogate normative prescriptions for behaviour and reclaim space by defying gendered myths and subverting notions of patriarchy, androcentricity, and binarism. Dipali’s research interests focus on feminist theory, post humanism, the body and identity politics and her multi-disciplinary practice appropriates from genres across Eastern and Western art canons.
Her works have been shown in cities around the world, including Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Hong Kong, Helsinki, New Delhi, London, and Miami. In 2022, she was selected for inclusion in the inaugural ILHAM Art Show at ILHAM Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, and was a finalist in the Sovereign Asian Art Prize in Hong Kong. She has had smaller showcases of her work in Mutual Aids Projects (Uncertain Relaxation, 2020) and Suma Orientalis (2019), both in Kuala Lumpur. Desire Lines is her first solo exhibition. She currently lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
