Sutapa Biswas


Sutapa Biswas is a British Indian conceptual artist, who works across a range of media including painting, drawing, film and time-based media.

Early life

She was born in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, India, in 1962. At the age of four, she moved to London, England with her family. Between 1981 and 1985 she studied at the University of Leeds. She then studied art the Slade School of Art in London from 1988-1990. Between 1996-1998 Biswas studied at the Royal College of Art.

Career

As a conceptual artist, Biswas works in a variety of mediums, including performance, film, photography and installation. During the 1980s, Biswas was primarily a painter. For instance, her paintings Housewives with Steak-Knives and Through Rose-Tinted Windows form part of the Bradford Museums and Galleries permanent collections on display at Cartwright Hall. She also worked in video. Kali is a thirty-minute video video that the artist Sutapa Biswas made while a student at the University of Leeds. It documents a performance by the artist as Kali and her fellow student as Ravan. Kali – whose name means the ‘black one’ – is the Hindu goddess of time and change and within Hindu mythology she was created to inhabit more than one representation to rid the world of evil, which is here embodied by Ravan. Biswas often draws from myths and iconography from ancient Hindu mythologies, speaking of the symbolism she says 'I want people to research into my culture, as I've been doing into European and Western culture'. In 1985, Biswas's work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in the exhibition The Thin Black Line, an exhibition of young Black and Asian women artists curated by Lubaina Himid.
Sutapa Biswas's works often reflect on questions of gender and cultural and ethnic identity. For instance, her film Birdsong captures the story of young Indian boy who longs to own a horse and is filmed against the backdrop of an English period home. Biswas is also keen to use humour and satire in her work. In her painting 'The Last Mango in Paris' depicting two women talking and peeling mango's the caption below reads. M: 'If you were to be re-born, and had a choice what would you come back as?' B: 'If I were to be reborn again, I would be born an English dog, because in England they look after their dogs really well.' She is keen to use her work as a platform for people to begin to address their own racism. Biswas was the 2008 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art, and is a European Photography Award nominee. She is currently a Reader Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Public collections

Biswas' work is held in the following public collection:
1987 Sutapa Biswas, Horizon Gallery, London
1992 Synapse: Sutapa Biswas, The Photographers' Gallery, London,.