SUTAPA BISWAS: LUMEN

A major solo exhibition reflecting the artist’s vital contribution to the Black Arts Movement in Britain.

Showing across both Newlyn Art Gallery, and The Exchange in Penzance.

Since the early 1980s, Sutapa Biswas’ works have addressed questions of identity, and ideas of dislocation and belonging, through the display of drawing, photography, neon, and the moving image.

The upper gallery at Newlyn Art Gallery is dedicated to Biswas’ latest filmwork. Lumen, 2021 is inspired by the artist’s journey by sea with her family from Mumbai to Dover, the semi-fictional narrative tells the stories of her mother and grandmother through a poetic and powerful monologue. The film evokes maritime histories of trade and transportation, with personal memories and stories of migration and displacement that unfold and overlap with colonial histories during the British Raj.

At The Exchange are presented a number of film works and a large series of delicate bird drawings, Time Flies, 2004–ongoing. Referencing taxidermy birds and colonial paintings in which birds were a familiar motif, the works consider loss, grief, and are a moving tribute to her late father, who Biswas describes as ‘birdlike’.

A projected film piece, Birdsong, 2004 (#5) was shaped by Biswas’s experience of motherhood, and inspired by the first sentence spoken by the artist’s then eighteen-month-old son when he asked his mother if a horse could live with them in their family home.

Another projection, Light rain, 2014–21 was shot in the Japanese city of Beppu, famous for its hot springs. The two-screen installation captures billowing clouds of steam rising out from between the buildings, creating a strange, almost otherworldly vista, permeated by the ambient sounds of traffic.