Sutapa Biswas: Lumen

About

This major solo exhibition by Sutapa Biswas will span the artist’s extensive career. Biswas was a vital contributor to the Black Arts Movement in Britain and to shifting understanding of post-war British art. Biswas' 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’.

Since the early 1980s, Biswas’ works have explored themes of time and space, particularly in relationship to gender, identity and desire. The exhibition will demonstrate the artist’s acute commitment to addressing questions of identity and ideas of dislocation and belonging, through the display of drawing, photography and the moving image. Several works included in the exhibition address recurring themes of motherhood and colonial histories.

The exhibition will include a new film that maps a semi-fictional narrative of migration, 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 is made possible thanks to Thomas Dane Gallery and a group of private galleries and individuals. The commission has been additionally supported by Autograph. Supported by Arts Council England.

This exhibition has been developed in partnership with Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, and is accompanied by a new publication designed by Kajsa Ståhl of Åbäke and co-published with Kettle’s Yard. The publication is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Exhibition and publication supported by Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University.