Anicka Yi's Turbine Hall and Sutapa Biswas: Lumen – review

The Turbine Hall has been turned into a mesmerising giant aquarium by Anicka Yi. And the steak knives are out in Sutapa Biswas’s wise, poetic response to colonial history.

The Indian-born artist Sutapa Biswas (born 1962) is a vital figure in British anti-racist culture, specifically the intersection of black feminism and the 1980s Black Arts Movement. Her wise and powerful retrospective at Kettle’s Yard opens with arguably her most famous work. Housewives with Steak-Knives (1985-86) presents a glaring red Kali – Hindu goddess of time and death – with a meat cleaver in one of her several hands and a necklace of severed heads. One belongs to a white man. Surely British; possibly a totem of the Raj. A big painting, leaning abruptly out from the wall, it bristles with political force.

Alongside are two larger-than-life portraits of Biswas protecting her younger sister, a weapon in her raised hand. All three paintings were made when Biswas was living and studying in the north of England; a brown body, in her phrase, menaced by local neo-Nazis.

Since then, Biswas has made many different kinds of art. This show includes several of her fantastically mysterious monochrome photographs of living women lying on ancient goddess sculptures, where it becomes almost impossible to distinguish the two female forms, or to tell art from reality. The living woman is Biswas herself, deep in self-effacing shadow.

And suspended from the ceiling are three absolutely haunting visions – negative transparencies of an Indian woman holding her daughter, magnified almost to the size of life. Light passes through them so that you see both their shadows on the wall and the way that they have lost their identities. Dark eyes light, black hair white, they are ghosts of the past, trapped in sheets of glass. Memories of people long ago, skimmed from life but altered by time, fading along with their photographs.

Biswas has a poet’s gift for these contemplative echoes and metaphors. So much so that the latest work in this show, the specially commissioned film Lumen, takes the form of images intersecting with a prose poem performed by an actress, telling of sea journeys and the lives of Indian servants and British masters in colonised India.

There are exquisite juxtapositions of old and new footage. British ladies drift about in white lace, while their husbands play a spot of croquet, waited upon by unnoticed brown bodies. Roots start to grow over abandoned Raj buildings. But still the acrobat rides the tightrope of poverty on a tin hoop, moved with his agile foot, and fishermen continue to cast their nets for a scant livelihood, in those days as now.

Alas, the actress strenuously emphasises the wrong words, almost first to last. But Biswas’s visions rise above everything in all their sad beauty. Colour seeps into black and white, and vice versa; and the faces of the dead keep returning, fragments of colonial history spooling into our times, the ever-circling presence of the past.

Star ratings (out of five)

Anicka Yi: In Love with the World ★★★★☆

Sutapa Biswas: Lumen ★★★★☆

Anicka Yi: In Love with the World was at Tate Modern, London, until 16 January 2022.

Sutapa Biswas: Lumen was at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until 30 January 2022.