Vandana Kalra: “Do artworks keep evolving, acquiring new meanings, even after leaving the artist’s studio?”
                Shilpa Gupta: “They do […] [One example] would be an outdoor light installation which is currently being shown on Lake Zurich. In the 2004 work, lines from a ruled book rise and get transformed into three interwoven languages—English, Urdu and Hindi—all saying, ‘I live under your sky, too.’ Fifteen years ago…”
                -From Vandana Kalra’s interview with artist Shilpa Gupta on September 6, 2020

                Sometimes writing the trick of writing pretends that these words exist somehow “out there,” steady and stable, meaning the same thing year after year and place beyond place. I love staring at that illusion until I blink and see through it. Every piece of writing I really connect—like every piece of art that inspires or humbles me—is always acquiring new meaning.
                I first read this interview with Shilpa Gupta 2021, a few months after it happened. Since then I’ve returned to it: the webpage and the words are the same, but the meaning is different, just like Gupta’s light installation meant different things while changing times and places in 2004 to 2020. Perhaps that’s on my mind because a series like Uproar is a kind of transformation through time. I can go back and read the posts from 2015 or 2017 or 2020, and the pixels on my screen pretend they’re the same, but for me they never are. Sometimes what I wrote back then is a realization that has grown into the soil of my life, so now it’s a practice, and it’s surprising to see the seed being planted. Sometimes a quote I wrote about sounds completely different to my ear then it did then: not a seed but a shovel, or not a shovel but a mirror, or not a mirror but a crack in a mirror, or not a crack but a wildflower I admire as I pass by. 
                It’s not just our gardens that change. Our tools shift in our hands, too. When I started teaching a mentor told me, “I’ve been assigning The Catcher in the Rye long enough to go from seeing myself in the teenager to seeing myself in the older teacher.” When I pay attention to the readings I assign students, they all change, year after year: not just in how I see myself in them, but in how they connect to the world around them and in what they make possible.