To Kill Two Birds with One Stone

To Kill Two Birds with One Stone, 1993. Comprising saris loaned from members of the local Winnipeg, Canada community a white label pinned to each, sound incorporating a pre-recorded prose piece written by Biswas, small rocks hewn from a lake in Winnipeg, To Kill Two Birds with One Stone, 1992-1993, is a sound performance and installation by Biswas. Commissioned by the Plug-In Gallery of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada and the UK based arts organisation Locus+ (1970-2019), Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. to coincide with Biswas's solo exhibition at the Plug-In Gallery, Biswas's performance was developed over a duration of several months via correspondence between the artist, the gallery staff, and members of the wider Winnipeg community. Biswas has referred to this work as an 'absent performance' based on the fact that Biswas was physically absent from the gallery space where the performance itself took place; her presence represented only via an audio track composed and narrated by Biswas played back through stereo speakers in the gallery. The audio track thus formed the backbone of Biswas's performance. Within this, letters of the English alphabet formed the main axis of the sound against which the oral narratives of articles of clothing (saris) borrowed from a broad spectrum of members of the Winnipeg community, slowly unfolded. Drawn from snippets of conversations held in person by Biswas over a duration of ten days with the owners of the saris and members of the public keen to meet with Biswas, aspects of these individual's (subjects) familial journeys from their place of birth and / or their ancestral home were mapped out in prose form as a key part of the sound track and narration. A letter series of standardised questions garnered by Biswas from a local health spa formed another axis within the structure of the sound track. The audience (many of whom were not regular visitors to the gallery) occupied seating arranged on either side of a space designated to display the borrowed saris neatly folded into parcels. Each sari labelled with a letter of the alphabet corresponded to a stone collected from a local lake near Winnipeg. Biswas recalls that as the sound track played in the gallery, members of the audience prompted through recognition of information they had disclosed to Biswas, began to look at others in the audience curious to consider which narratives (in whole or part) belonged to which members of the audience.