Silver green against dark navy

Silver green against dark navy is a poetic work and neon sculpture that Biswas first conceived of in 2015 whilst she was the Kashima Artist in Residence, Oita, Japan. It was a period during which within the wider media (and social media platforms) there were widespread dissemination of images of migrants escaping war-torn territories across dangerous seas in dinghies. In escaping these harsh realities, many refugees drowned their bodies washed up on the shores of the Mediterranean. Being away from home at the time for Biswas meant that she experienced a keen sense of ‘her own foreign-ness and vulnerability’. Recalling at that moment how vulnerable her mother most likely felt when she with her children (including Biswas) in the mid-1960s had no alternative but to leave her country of birth (albeit in a ship) due to the complex political aftermath of a post-Independent India following centuries of colonial incursions under British rule Biswas reflected on the immense fear and depth of melancholy her mother must have felt. 

The wording of silver green against dark navy takes the form of a prose poem composed by Biswas late one night whilst bathing alone in a traditional Japanese onsen under the open night sky. Her poem was inspired partly by haiku and Biswas’s interest in William Shakespeare; the latter particularly significant in that Shakespeare’s work was foundational to the British education system and curricula taught in a pre-Independent India; a system under which Biswas’s own parents were taught as children. Silver green against dark navy, 2015-2021 thus conceptually returns to ideas of ‘spatial stories’, and often unwritten narratives born out of entangled colonial histories across geographies, space and time.