Sutapa Biswas: Lumen
16 October 2021 – 30 January 2022
Spanning the artist’s extensive career, this exhibition was the first substantial solo show in 14 years of British Indian artist Sutapa Biswas (b. 1962).
The show foregrounded Biswas’s vital contributions to the Black Arts Movement in Britain and to the shifting understanding of post-war British art. Biswas’s works visually disrupt, challenge and reimagine our present time: visual theorist Griselda Pollock said that it was Biswas who ‘forced us all to acknowledge the Eurocentric limits of the discourses within which we practise’. Including the seminal Housewives with Steak-Knives (1985) and Kali (1984), the exhibition demonstrated the richness, diversity and conceptual continuity of the artist’s extended practice through the display of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and video.
Kettle’s Yard hosted a new film that maps a semi-fictional narrative of migration, co-comissioned by Kettle’s Yard, Film and Video Umbrella, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, supported by Art Fund through the Moving Image for Museums programme.
Credits
The exhibition was curated by Amy Tobin with Jennifer Powell, assisted by Elizabeth Brown, Guy Haywood and Alina Khakoo. A companion exhibition opened at BALTIC in Gateshead in June 2021 and ran until March 2022.
Sutapa Biswas’s film Lumen (2020–21) was co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art with Art Fund support through the Moving Image Fund for Museums. This programme was made possible thanks to Thomas Dane Gallery and a group of private galleries and individuals. The commission was additionally supported by Autograph. Supported by Arts Council England.
Exhibition and publication supported by Manchester Metropolitan University.
Gallery
Installation photos: Rob Harris
Hear from Sutapa Biswas
Sutapa Biswas: Lumen Publication
With contributions by Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Sutapa Biswas, Alina Khakoo, Courtney J. Martin, Griselda Pollock, Amy Tobin and Alessandro Vincentelli.
Lumen is a new publication that accompanies the first solo exhibitions of the artist Sutapa Biswas in the UK since 2004. This book details Biswas’s career from its origins in the British Black Arts Movement in the 1980s, to her important photographic installations of the 1990s, and her subsequent major moving image works, including her newly commissioned film Lumen. The first substantial publication on the artist in over 19 years, it includes two new conversations with the artist, two commissioned essays as well as a republication of Griselda Pollock’s seminal text on Biswas’s work, along with a Postface reflecting on their relationship in the decades since the essay’s original publication.
Current Exhibitions
Sutapa Biswas: Lumen at BALTIC
