Housewives with Steak-knives

Housewives with Steak-knives, 1983-85 (figures 1 and 3), is a monumental artwork made by Sutapa Biswas whilst she was an undergraduate student of Fine Art and Art History at the University of Leeds, has since become one of the most iconic paintings of the late twentieth century. In his essay Two Places at Once, or the Same Place Twice: The Art of Sutapa Biswas, published by Iniva (UK) and Reed College (USA), the author Ian Baucom writes “the territory [Biswas] has charted as a painter, photographer, filmmaker, and installation artist is …a split territory, a transnational, trans-oceanic territory of belonging, a migrant and migrating territory in which as Salman Rushdie writes, there is not one but ‘many stories to tell, too many’, in part because the subjects of this diasporic space are always travelling, whether in body, in memory, in imagination, or in desire, between the here and there, now and then, the local and the global. Biswas’s work occupies and illuminates that travelling space. It soes so by paying particular attention to the female subjects of the South Asian diaspora, by shuttling back and forth across the waters of empire to find signs of life that a dispersed community of women has written onto its several landscapes of belonging.”

Housewives with Steak-knives is a canvas depicting Kali, the Hindu deity of peace and war. The sensuous, muscular strength of this undomesticated wanderer, the glance of menace that she returns to all those who presume to run their eyes across her, is complicated, however, by the apparent physical fragility of the piece. Composed of sections of acrylic, oil and pastel covered sections of paper joined together with masking tape, and the whole glued onto stretched canvas, but as Baucom continues, “Housewives with Steak-knives is a self-consuming artefact, a work that to its curators’ horror is persistently dismantling itself as, moment by moment, it sheds its paper skin. But to read this self-defoliating canvas as a ‘fragile’ work, as one that requires its curators to protect it from itself, is a mistake (and a characteristically imperial mistake: the British empire bult itself on such patronising misunderstandings). For as the canvas unglues itself, it scatters Kali’s body, distributing fragments of this female presence abroad. In doing so, Biswas’s work allegorises the post-imperial scatterings of the women of the sub-continent. But it also insists that identity survives dispersal.”