It may look a ltilte fnuny but, tehy say taht if at laset the fsrit lteter and lsat leettr of a wrod are lfet in the crrecot pacle, wilhe the ohter ltetres are mxied up, our mndis can mkae do, flil in the banlks and sitll raed the wrdos.

Shilpa Gupta's exhibition at Le Laboratoire, While We Sleep, explores the part of our brain that allows us this faculty--the unconscious brain which gathers and registers information we don't even know we've seen or heard, filling in the blanks and rearranging the missing info. 

Gupta worked with Harvard University psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, who studies the cognitive unconscious through behavioral tests and neuroimaging.  A huge proportion of our brain activity, up to 90%, is subconscious.  If it were otherwise, says Banaji, we wouldn't be able to function properly; we wouldn't be able to tie our shoes if we had to think about each step and consciously activate each muscle involved.  Our unconscious brain must take over for mundane tasks like these.  Yet it's precisely on this unconscious level where our brains operate that our fears and prejudices arise, asserts Banaji, who developed the Implicit Association Test that reveals subconscious biases in its subjects.  The test reveals prejudices towards race, gender and sexuality even in those who would contend they don't hold those prejudices--at least not consciously.

Shilpa Gupta, who lives in Mumbai, the site of recent terrorist attacks, believes it has become "so easy to hate" in contemporary India, and the Us/Other divide has given rise to a reactionary politics where fear reigns.  If votes can be motivated by unconscious prejudices, democracy fails and minorities receive little or no protection from the tyranny of the majority.  For Gupta, the political cannot be separated from life or art, and her work is often characterized with a socio-political edge, dealing with issues of terrorism and globalism.  For this exhibition, Gupta worked with Banaji to learn more about the part of our minds that produce fear and disgust, exploring the the concept of the unconscious, our sleeping mind and how it affects our social context.

The installation is in a darkened room, as if you're physically walking into the deep and dark unconscious, a Freudian nightmare of sorts.  The centerpiece of the exhibition is Singing Cloud, an amorphous cluster of black microphones, gathered together in an amoebic cloud, suspended from the ceiling.  Rather than registering sound, the microphones are reverse-wired and emit a buzz and a song, the sounds traveling in rhythmic ripples over the surface, moving from one side of the cloud to the other.  It's an eerie thing, and it calls out for us to "fly high high above", every once in a while whispering hushed words,"hindu", "muslim".  Luckily it doesn't lapse into the kind of soundtrack as we know from the Tolerance Museum--the hallway you walk through as recorded voices yell or whisper racial epithets at you--but is more subtle and whimsical, and structurally very impressive.  Across the room is a sign board, like the kind at train stations indicating arrivals and departures, flipping through different phrases, not randomly but in associative patterns, and in pointed groupings.  One digit changes and the entire phrase means something different entirely.

I found it interesting that Gupta chose to work primarily with sound and text, rather than images or video when exploring these issues of the unconscious mind.  It's as though we are not allowed to simply take in the images, react to them with our implicit associations, but we must take in the information through constantly changing or rearranged text, and we follow the invisible sound of the Singing Cloud with our eyes, forcing us to walk up to it and listen closer.  It's almost as if she intended for us to stretch our minds out of our comfortable habits, the comfortable realm of our prejudices.  In the Médiathèque we can stretch our minds further, undergoing the Implicit Association Test (you can also take it online at implicit.harvard.edu) and learning more about Banaji's and Gupta's experiments with the unconscious mind.

--Natalie Hegert

(*Images:  Shilpa Gupta et Mahzarin Banaji, While I Sleep, February 13 - May 4, 2009; Le Laboratoire, © Marc Domage.)