Skip to main content
University of Cambridge

Open: Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm

We are closed on Bank Holiday Mondays

Kettle’s Yard will be closed for the festive period between 24 December 2024 – 1 January 2025 inclusive. We will open as normal from 2 January 2025.

Book Tickets

Open: Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–5pm

We are closed on Bank Holiday Mondays

Kettle’s Yard will be closed for the festive period between 24 December 2024 – 1 January 2025 inclusive. We will open as normal from 2 January 2025.

Sutapa Biswas, still from Lumen, 2020
Exhibition

Sutapa Biswas: Lumen

16 October 2021 – 30 January 2022

This event has passed. Free

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

Hear from Sutapa Biswas