Sutapa Biswas: Lumen

‘Swallow me whole and spit me not out’ implores the neon text of Sutapa Biswas’s silver green against dark navy (2015; cat. no. XXVII), a plea that is also echoed in the artist’s new film Lumen (2021). This thought came to Biswas (b.1962) while on an artist residency in Japan in 2015, just as the refugee crisis was unfolding across the Middle East and Europe, and while she was contemplating not only the perilous sea voyages many fleeing their homelands were forced to make, but also the life that awaited them on arrival. Biswas’s urgent call articulates a desire for acceptance: to be welcomed fully and not spat out by a new community where one seeks to make their home.

Lumen is a semi-fictional reimagining of the artist’s matrilineal family history, which interweaves memories of migration and diaspora across time and space. The film’s primary location is the ornate Red Lodge Museum in Bristol, where a poetic, non-linear monologue, written by Biswas, is recited by the actress Natasha Patel in the roles of the artist’s mother and grandmother. These scenes are intercut with a present-day film of the sea and banyan trees in India and archival footage of British families and their Indian servants from the late period of the British Raj. The film thematically traverses various crossings: the passage of slaves across the Indian Ocean; Biswas’s grandmother’s displacement following Partition in 1947; and the artist’s voyage as a child in 1966 with her mother and siblings, which took her from her birthplace of Santiniketan, West Bengal, to London. Her father, a Marxist academic, had already fled from political persecution in India, arriving in London six months earlier.

Lumen is the centrepiece at Kettle’s Yard and a concurrent exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Screened at both venues, the film also lends its name to the two shows, which span four decades of Biswas’s career. The BALTIC display reflects on its proximity to the Tyne with a focus on colonial histories of nautical trade, while the more intimate space at Kettle’s Yard explores the concept of home and wider communities of women in the artist’s life.

In the first gallery, painted a stark, institutional white, we are confronted by Biswas’s reimagination of the Hindu goddess Kali (in Sanskrit, ‘she who is black’) as a powerful matriarch. The painting Housewives with Steak-knives (cat. no. I) is designed to sit forward from the wall and hangs at an imposing angle. In the work, the artist employs Modernist tropes, such as flat planes of colour, in order to subvert the movement’s patriarchal lineage. Biswas’s depiction of Kali, with her open-palm gesture, sets the tone for this display of her politically strident earlier work, which comes together in a harmony of black, white, red and brown. Housewives with Steak-knives featured in Biswas’s graduate show at Leeds University and was subsequently shown in Lubaina Himid’s pivotal The Thin Black Line exhibition of 1985 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, alongside works by artists who found solidarity in the British Black Arts Movement.

In the painting, Kali wears a necklace strung together with male heads representing evils that must be destroyed: capitalism, communism and colonialism. She brandishes a machete while holding a Xerox image of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (c.1620) as both challenge and call to action. Here, Gentileschi is representative of the Western canon, but also a reference to the marginalised artist working in a patriarchal structure. In another reckoning with a pivotal female figure in her life, the young artist adopted the guise of Kali in the eponymous performance and film Kali (1983–85; nos. V–X). The feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, Biswas’s tutor and mentor at Leeds, was invited to the artist’s studio and, upon arrival, was hooded and told to take a seat. For the duration of the performance, Pollock sits at the centre of a ritual devised to exorcise the imperial legacies of a department and decolonise a curriculum that, while priding itself on its politically progressive merits, did not engage with issues of race and colonialism.

On a similarly monumental scale to Housewives with Steak-knives, the diptych As I Stood, Listened and Watched, My Feelings Were This Woman Is Not For Burning (1985–86; no. II) depicts Biswas and her sister embracing. One figure is vulnerable, the other protective and defiant. The painting was made at the Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, at a time when the city was a focus for racist groups, such as the National Front. The wall text details the artist’s recollection of making the work while ‘being stared at by people dressed in fascist memorabilia’. The patterned garment that appears here and in Housewives with Steak-knives – reminiscent of a print of Kali given to the artist by her grandmother as a child – functions as a protective talisman, and sparked in Biswas an interest in buried memories.

This yearning for cultural belonging takes shape in the deeply resonant Synapse (1987–92; no. XV), a series of black-and-white photographic self-portraits following Biswas’s first journey back to India as an adult, in which she projected photographs of landscapes and Buddhist and Hindu sculptures of deities onto her body. Profoundly vulnerable and expressive in mood, Synapse II shows the artist curled on the floor, her unclothed body cradled in the projected arms of goddesses. Here, Biswas’s subversion of the Orientalising gaze is an act of cultural reclamation and rediscovery. Furthermore, she uses the mutability of the photographic medium to explore a fascination with the temporal and the indeterminacy of memory.

For the curator Amy Tobin, it was crucial that the show should not relegate Biswas’s early work solely to the context of its creation, but instead provide space for the study of its postcolonial continuities in the present. Fittingly, the curatorial assistant Alina Khakoo and the writer Lola Olufemi have organised an accompanying programme of events, including an evening of poetry readings by Biswas, Sisters Uncut and Cambridge FLY, Cambridge University’s forum for women and non-binary people of colour, to take place in January 2022.

For Biswas, poetry represents movement between locations and the interweaving of culture. This is furnished by memories of her parents reading Shakespeare and Keats to her as a child – bittersweet experiences given the poetic and linguistic traditions that were stifled in India under direct rule. Lumen utilises different poetic and visual registers – from the conceptually concrete to the abstract – while excoriating colonial rule and its intrusion on domestic life. These caustic passages are delivered by Patel in precise staccato, and are a satire of colonialist efforts to quantify and classify, articulated as an inventory of objects and, of course, subjects, of empire. Droning, ambient sound signals the underlying violence of this organising principle.

Artists exhibiting in the Kettle’s Yard galleries are typically invited to make their mark on the adjacent house. Here, a painting of a crow nestles on the floor amid the foliage of Kettle’s Yard house. It is taken from the artist’s series of birds, Time Flies (2004; no. 3). The bird is a central motif in Biswas’s practice; in Lumen, we are introduced to an omniscient character referred to as ‘Crow’, who exists outside of time as history’s social conscience. This figure is mentioned repeatedly in the monologue, in which the English are likened to all other colonial forces: militaristic, ‘not much different’. Lumen’s main backdrop, the aforementioned Red Lodge Museum in Bristol, conjures figures linked both to the slave trade and abolitionism. As the camera follows Patel through this space, it comes to rest beside a fireplace of Delft tiles, which, alongside the indigo and lapis lazuli referenced in the monologue, serve as markers of art histories and, inextricably, maritime trade. The colour blue surfaces throughout the film, used to visually link these histories of colonialism, art and family. Biswas also uses formal devices, including mirrors, to underscore the film’s multiple perspectives.

The secondary gallery space at Kettle’s Yard, where Lumen is screened, is itself demarcated by blue-black darkness, in direct contrast to the stark display of Biswas’s earlier work. Still, some brightness penetrates the deep palette of Lumen, a word defined as ‘a unit of light’ – something that is small, yet significant. Biswas dares to imagine a hopeful future, casting light on the deceptive myths of empire in creative resistance, while resurrecting forgotten histories.