Birdsong

Birdsong, 2004. Re-telecinied from the original 16mm film onto 8K and 4K. Co-commissioned by Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), UK and Film and Video Umbrella, UK. Installation view, Sutapa Biswas: Lumen, solo exhibition 2021-2022, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead ©. Sutapa Biswas © Sutapa Biswas. All Rights Reserved. DACS 2026.

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).

As the author and Director, Whitechapel Gallery Gilane Tawadros writes, “Looking across more than two decades of her distinctive artistic practice, there is one continuous and recurring subject matter that emerges forcefully from Sutapa Biswas’s work: time. Not linear time that moves sequentially from beginning to end. Nor present time, unhinged from the past. Time, in Biswas’s work, is fleeting and elusive and yet capable of changing everything irrevocably, over and over again. The fragile, metallic birds in her most recent film, Magnesium Bird, are ignited and metamorphose before our eyes, almost beyond recognition. The small boy who sits waiting, staring expectantly out towards the camera in Birdsong, awaits a magical happening that transforms his immediate, everyday world. In these works, Biswas’s lens captures a quality of time and light that finds echoes in the great paintings of Vermeer, Stubbs and Hopper. 

From her earliest paintings of the 1980s through to her more recent film works, Biswas has been preoccupied with the search to push representation beyond the secure confines of describing the physical world to embody the pleasure and pain of lived experience. In these new works, Biswas takes this search further to produce poetic works that are magical and compelling.” – Gilane Tawadros.

From Sutapa Biswas: Birdsong, London and Portland, Oregon: Iniva and Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, 2004, published to coincide with the exhibition Sutapa Biswas: Birdsong, Café Gallery Projects, London; Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham; Harewood House and Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds; and Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Portland, Oregon, 2004-2005.