Time flies

Time flies, 2000-2021, are a series of paintings and drawings of birds some of which are imagined, and others based on photographs and historic archival paintings from circa 1700s onwards. Part of an on-going body of work, each painting functions as an homage to Biswas’s last conversation with her father. The artist recounts that her father who was a well-read man. A wordsmith who loved the taxonomies of language, he spoke five different languages and read Persian. On his deathbed (her father died of cancer whilst in hospital) during their final conversation, Biswas had reflected on the evocation by the writer Marcel Proust of a woodpigeon’s call through the forest as a metaphor and marker of time and distance. Sharing with her father, Biswas continued that even after his death while she may not remember every discussion they had engaged in as father and daughter during their lives, that for Biswas his words would be akin to the woodpigeon’s call through the forest – a reminder of things spoken cutting through the distance and the passage of time. The first sounds Biswas heard following her father’s death, was the sound of birdsong (the title of a film that Biswas developed following her father’s death). Biswas recounts that her father was bird-like in his mannerisms. Time flies thus evolved as an act of remembering for Biswas. Engaging with questions of loss, it is a meditation on time and space in relation to histories – both past and present.