Sutapa Biswas – a pioneering artist of exile, race and resistance

Her show at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge draws on her family’s flight from India and the UK’s insular art world.

The author Toni Morrison described memory as “a form of willed creation”. At Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, an exhibition by Sutapa Biswas is a shining manifestation of this delicate, complex and at times painful process.

At its core is “Lumen”, a new 25-minute film which weaves together threads from Biswas’s past and present. Born in West Bengal in 1962, Biswas spent the first four years of her life in India before moving to the UK with her parents and four siblings. The move was forced on the family when Biswas’s father, a Marxist intellectual, fell foul of India’s ruling Congress party.

Filmed in India and the UK, the film’s spine is a lyrical text written by Biswas and narrated by actor Natasha Patel. As Patel roams the rooms of Red Lodge, a historic house in Bristol that was once home to abolitionist Mary Carpenter, her mellifluous tones transport us back and forth across time and space in a pilgrimage whose lodestone is the arduous journey from Mumbai to Dover made by Biswas’s mother and her young family after her father had gone on ahead.

Haunted by the memory of her mother’s anguish, first at the separation from her husband, then at the strange and often hostile atmosphere of her new home, Biswas writes much of “Lumen” from her mother’s point of view. Plunged into “terrain I had never seen before”, her mother longs for a world where “the scent of breakfast was something special”. Interleaving scenes of 21st-century India, waterfronts captured before the day begins, a child acrobat performing on a city street, with archive footage from the British Empire & Commonwealth Collection in Bristol, “Lumen” is at once a crystalline assault on colonialism, an anti-elegy to post-Partition India and a heartfelt love song to a country “where sails stretched and birds/of paradise lined branches”.

Throughout the tale, the figure of a crow acts as both prophet and witness. “I cannot look but Crow, she’s not afraid,” says Biswas’s narrator, hinting perhaps that Crow is Biswas herself, the artist daughter who would look bravely at her past to understand her present.

Taking its title from the word for a unit of light, “Lumen” finishes with a shot of Patel drawing a snow-white length of fabric from her mouth and tucking it into her dress as if she is determined to safeguard her own luminosity from potential predators.

That was a lesson Biswas herself had to learn. Growing up in the UK, she found herself, like so many artists of colour, invisible to the white-dominated mainstream. One of the highlights of the Cambridge show is a rare opportunity to see “Kali” (1983-85), the film Biswas made while still an art student as a radical act of resistance to this scandalous neglect.

Shot on video and transferred to digital, the film shows Biswas and her fellow student Isabelle Tracey performing what feels like an exorcism as they dance and battle each other around a silent, unmoving figure wearing a white hood. In their makeshift binbag outfits, waving fake swords under a cruel flashing light, the young women evoke both tenderness and terror. Biswas represents Kali, the goddess who in Hindu mythology was put on earth to vanquish the devil Raban, played by Tracey. In Biswas’s video, Kali is a feminist warrior while Raban represents the demonic force of capitalism. At once omnipotent and vulnerable, the central figure remains ambiguous. Is she a witch doomed for the stake? Or is she herself a murderer, her hood an allusion to the KKK?

In truth, the sinister, silent partner is feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, who was Biswas’s tutor at Leeds. The only student of colour on the course, Biswas, who inherited her father’s gift for speaking truth to power, convinced her teacher to participate in the performance to highlight the exclusion of black and brown artists and their histories from even Pollock’s ostensibly progressive curriculum. Pollock changed her course as a result.

It wasn’t enough. Although Biswas has participated in many exhibitions, including The Thin Black Line, Lubaina Himid’s landmark 1985 exhibition of art by British practitioners of colour, it’s taken nearly 30 years for her to receive solid national recognition. (Alongside Kettle’s Yard, another solo show is being held simultaneously at Gateshead’s Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art.) Bafflingly, she still has no commercial gallery.

It’s our loss as well as hers. At Kettle’s Yard, works such as “Synapse 1” (1987-92) testify to a practice that, decades ago, was already dazzling in its command of emotion, aesthetics and a politics that is sure-footed but never heavy-handed. A suite of four hand-printed black and white photographs, it shows small, mysterious, silvery images, a carved god, the corner of a scaffolded building, a bird flying over what may be a palace, figures bathing in a river. Each one floats in a black, velvety background. Look closely and you can see the glimmer of a finger and the edge of a breast.

Taken in 1986-87 during her first return to India, each of the central snapshots encodes an intimate, personal memory. “I carried [the photographs] around in my wallet when I returned,” she says when I ask her for the work’s background. “They occupied my psyche. They felt like my passport.”

The final work came about when Biswas projected those beloved images on to her own skin and photographed the result to create an eloquent reminder of how fiercely history, both public and private, inscribes itself on our bodies. That subtle corporeal awareness underpins Biswas’s practice. It was present too in Biswas’s own quiet movements as she sat sewing a loose, abstract pattern on to the back of earlier silk work “Stitch by Stitch” in the centre of the gallery at Kettle’s Yard at the press view.

In 2015 during a trip to Japan, Biswas was collaborating with women from the Oita community and discovered that the best way to understand a little of their lives was to ask them about their first kimono. She then created “Stitch by Stitch” out of different kimono fragments donated by the women. In Kettle’s Yard, she worked further on it, the threads petering off as if they were the main work’s underside, unplanned and not designed for show. Those vibrant, unfinished embroideries hint at the hidden narratives that shadow the western art world still. Let’s be thankful that, at least, Biswas’s own voice is at last being heard.