Lumen

Lumen, 2021. Single channel projection, colour with 5.1 sound (stereo option). Duration: 30 min. 8K and 4K digital format, mastered onto 4K. ©Sutapa Biswas. All Rights Reserved. DACS 2026. Co-commissioned by FVU, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art with Art Fund support through the Moving Image Fund for Museums. The commission is additionally supported by Autograph Abp, London by Arts Council England.

The title Lumen comes from the word’s dual meanings - as a unit of light and a gradience of radiance, and an anatomical term for a bodily cavity or conduit, such as an artery, along which blood flows. These two meanings converge in the metaphor of ‘light at the end of a tunnel’; an expression that helps light a way into Sutapa Biswas’s film Lumen, setting the scene for its fluctuations of clarity and darkness, its alternating states of euphoria and trauma, its lurches between poetry and pathology.’ A semi-fictional narrative work Lumen explores the matrilineal and complex journeys of three displaced generations of women across geographies and histories, and back and forth across time as seen through a feminist lens.

Underpinned by an interest in questions relating to trauma, loss and desire, Lumen is a lament for the sights and sounds of India she and her family had to leave behind on their protracted sea voyage to England, the film is also an angry reproach of centuries of colonial rule, and its implacable incursions on domestic life. Where history has often marginalised the female voice, Biswas reinstates it, not just as mainstay of family and home but as avatar of social conscience. Mixing archive material and newly filmed footage to embellish its bravura central monologue, Biswas lends this deeply personal narrative a compelling universal resonance. Seen through a glass darkly, Lumen sheds unflinching light on the ripple effects of a complex and turbulent past.” – Steven Bode, Formerly Director, Film and Video Umbrella, UK, and Executive Producer, Lumen, 2021.