Review of Shilpa Gupta at Hamburger Bahnhof

by Carolin Kralapp // June 12, 2026

This article is part of our feature topic Scale.

Some words are meant to be read. Others, insists Shilpa Gupta, must be walked through. In her current solo exhibition ‘What Still Holds’ at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, both approaches prove essential. The Mumbai-based artist confronts visitors with the word ‘TRUTH,’ rendered at an architectural scale: oversized letters that transform a loaded word into a landscape that you can physically inhabit and carefully decipher. The letters are deliberately out of order, so what you can read depends entirely on your position, providing a spatial metaphor for how our perspective shapes our access to the truth. Scale here is not just spectacle. It raises questions about power: who gets to define truth, who controls its reach and what mechanisms work to preserve or quietly erase it?

‘Shilpa Gupta. What Still Holds,’ installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 2026-2027, Depicted: ‘Someone Else – A Library of 100 Books Written Anonymously or Under Pseudonyms,’ 2011; ‘Truth,’ 2022-2025; Joseph Beuys: ‘Straßenbahnhaltestelle. A Monument to the Future (2. Fassung),’ 1976; ‘100 Hand-Drawn Maps of My Country,’ 2008/14 – ongoing (from left to right) // © Shilpa Gupta, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Sammlung Marx, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2026, photo by Luca Girardini

Gupta’s multidisciplinary practice has long explored how language carries, conceals and transforms meaning through installations, videos, sculptures and performances. At Hamburger Bahnhof, this exploration is presented in conversation with the permanent works of Joseph Beuys, making Gupta the fourth female artist to engage with this dialogue, following Naama Tsabar, Andrea Pichl and Delcy Morelos. The pairing is particularly resonant as both artists share a profound interest in language, participation and the social aspects of art. While Beuys believed in the transformative power of human creativity as a political force, Gupta considers what happens when this force encounters systems designed to suppress it. In a cultural moment when information feels both omnipresent and under threat, ‘What Still Holds’ is an exhibition that rewards both the reader and the wanderer.

Shilpa Gupta: ‘What Still Holds,’ 2026, installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart // © Shilpa Gupta, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, photo by Luca Girardini

‘Someone Else: A Library of 100 Books Written Anonymously or Under Pseudonyms’ is one of the exhibition’s quietest and most unsettling works. One hundred metallic book covers bearing the titles of real publications that appeared without their authors’ true names are arranged to form a library. The reasons for this are engraved directly on the covers, ranging from fear of political persecution and protection of reputation to discrimination based on gender or origin. Together, they form a silent archive of hidden identities and a collection of voices shaped by pressure and constraint. Each volume captures the tension between the desire to speak out and the need to remain invisible. In doing so, the work raises a question that resonates throughout the entire exhibition: who gets to author their own story?

In ‘StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream,’ Gupta repurposes two mechanical split-flap display boards, the kind once used in airports and train stations to announce arrivals and departures. Instead of displaying travel information, the boards cycle through short reflections by the artist, their panels flipping in a steady, hypnotic rhythm. Words appear, fragment and reassemble, engaging in a subtle dialogue with each other. The work reveals that information does not circulate evenly and that understanding depends on context and personal conviction. When placed within a museum that is itself a former railway hall, the boards take on an additional layer of meaning: what is announced, what is withheld and what simply passes through?

‘Shilpa Gupta. What Still Holds,’ installation view at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 2026-2027, Depicted: ‘StillTheyKnowNotWhatIDream,’ 2021 (foreground), ‘Untitled,’ 2008/25 (background) // © Shilpa Gupta. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, photo by Luca Girardini

‘Untitled (Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak)’ is a marble sculpture depicting multiple hands reaching towards the eyes, ears and mouth, all extending from a single body. This deliberate invocation of the three wise monkeys motif has its roots in a 17th-century carving at a Buddhist temple in Japan, which was later popularized in India through the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. However, in Gupta’s version, this moral code is no longer reassuring, but instead becomes a troubling portrait of complicity and self-imposed silence. By merging several gestures into one figure, the sculpture implicates the individual in structures of collective indifference. The work appears serene from a distance but deeply uncomfortable up close, which is precisely the point.

‘Shilpa Gupta. What Still Holds,’ Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 2026-2027, Depicted: ‘Untitled (Don’t See, Don’t Hear, Don’t Speak),’ 2006/26 // © Shilpa Gupta, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, photo by Luca Girardini

‘What Still Holds’ compellingly argues for the power of written art, presenting language not merely as a subject matter, but as a material, an architectural element and a political act. Throughout the exhibition, words are broken apart and rearranged, sealed inside bottles, worn away on chalkboards, hidden under pseudonyms or flashed past in the blink of a mechanical display. Gupta insists that language is never neutral; it is always shaped by the forces that allow some words to circulate freely while silencing others entirely.

This exhibition is particularly powerful because it operates simultaneously on the scale of the body and the scale of history. As visitors walk between the concrete letters of ‘TRUTH,’ they become physically implicated in the question the work poses. The breadth of works spanning over 20 years also reveals a sustained and rigorous approach to exploring the systems that govern what can be said, by whom and when. Gupta does not offer easy answers. Instead, she creates spaces, both literal and conceptual, where reading and bearing witness are inseparable. Ultimately, that is what endures.