Thinking off the grid

Sakshi Gupta's Spaces of Being packs in chickens, eggs, feathers, and ideas. Think of it as a metaphor for a restless mind

- AYESHA SINGH

Some exhibitions give us a bodily jolt, goosebumps.T hey spark a Eureka moment, a shift in our thinking. I cannot produce a long list of artworks that have done that for me, but Sakshi Gupta's Spaces of Being is certainly one.

The work is a life-size sculpture made with reclaimed industrial metal, and depicts the many compartments of a packed chicken coop. It contains hundreds of birds - baby chicks, hens, roosters all attempting to break free from the confines of the grid they are stuck within. Some birds lay in deep crevasses between or behind others, and a few outside the frame. They appear in all sizes, shapes, with varied feathers and scales, some young and others old, and parts of the work have fragments of dismembered limbs. Gupta defines them as "irrational, grotesque, pathetic and simultaneously seductive, poetic and even comical - all at once," in her note on the 2023 show If the Seas Catch Fire, at which the work was exhibited.