Birdsong

Birdsong, 2004. Re-telecinied from the original 16mm film onto 8K and 4K. Birdsong is a dual-screen projection film installation. Shot in colour with no sound, played on a loop, the left- and right-hand screens are near identical and throughout appear as if the actions of one screen follow the other. Biswas describes this as “if watching a fox chase its own tail”. Based on a conversation between Biswas and her son who, when eighteen months of age, expressed his desire to have a horse living with him in their home, Birdsong also recalls the last conversation with the artist’s father before he passed away which was about birds, and from which the work’s title is drawn. Seen through the eyes of a child, Biswas’s own son who appears in the film, Birdsong takes us between the real and the imaginary or dream world. It is a film tableau in which a horse is viewed in a domestic interior, standing motionless except for the gentle and subtle movements of its body. “Initiating a finely poised call-and-response between a pair of near-identical projection screens, Sutapa Biswas’ Birdsong circles through a cluster of dream-like images of slow-burning power and intensity. While the repeated motif of a child’s paper mobile instils a mood of delicate reverie, the sudden, hallucinatory appearance of a fully-grown horse in the midst of a typically bourgeois living room lends a frisson of Freudian fantasy. Ruffling the illusion of domestic tranquillity with a note of mystery and ambiguity, Biswas collides the familiar and the unfamiliar to capture something of the strangeness that lurks behind the surface of ordinary, everyday reality. A companion video, Magnesium Bird, is an equally charged affair; a lyrical flight of fancy that burns all the more brightly for its stark reminders of the fleeting, fragile nature of existence.” (Steven Bode, formerly Director Film and Video Umbrella, UK).

Drawing upon historical British landscape genre paintings by artists such as John Constable and James Seymour, through its reconstructed aesthetics Birdsong specifically references George Stubbs’ painting, Henry Fox and the Earl of Albermarle Shooting at Goodwood (c.1759), which Biswas first encountered whilst an undergraduate student of fine art and art history. Stubb’s composition depicts a hunting scene of the aristocracy at play whilst their young black male livery servant, tends to his master's horse. Though the young servant’s facial expression appears calm, his gaze appears to cut across the very landscape in which his masters are at play. Seemingly challenging the young man’s designation of status, in reference Birdsong visually and poetically unsettles our perceptions of desire, time and place.