Inside the Mind of Sutapa Biswas

The artist takes after her activist father.

Biswas, who was born in Santinekethan in West Bengal in 1962, credits him for her ‘fierce independence’. An academic, he was politically at odds with the Indian government at the time, and after criticising its damaging agricultural policies, fled to the UK in 1965 (his wife and children followed the next year).

“My brother told me much later that had he stayed, his life would have been in danger.”

Debate and philosophising were encouraged in the Biswas house in west London, as were her father’s three mantras – dance, music and play.

“My dad instilled in us a confidence that was extraordinary, so we were never afraid our voice was not worthy of being heard,” she says. “We felt at liberty to ask questions – not to say there are firm answers, but to see what comes back.”

She was the first student of colour to graduate from the Fine Art Department at Leeds University.

She studied fine art and art history, on a prestigious course then headed by T.J. Clark. Biswas’s degree show included a performance piece, Kali (1983–84), titled after the fearsome Hindu goddess of time and change. A video of it, now in Tate’s collection, shows the 20-year-old Biswas performing a kind of exorcism centred on her tutor, the feminist scholar Griselda Pollock, in an exhilarating index of Biswas’s desire to decolonise the course curricula.

Pollock, with whom the artist formed a close bond, remarked that it was Biswas who “forced us all to acknowledge the Eurocentric limits” of academic thinking about art.

Another graduate piece has endured as an iconic work in the Black Arts Movement.

Housewives with Steak-knives (1984–85), depicting the same goddess brandishing a bloodied blade and severed male head, was exhibited to the public alongside Kali shortly after Biswas’s degree show, in an exhibition of Black women’s art, The Thin Black Line, curated by Lubaina Himid RA at the ICA in London.

A monumental oil and pastel drawing, it became a focal point of the show, putting Biswas’s name on the map. Himid recalled that during the show’s run, “some idiot spat on the piece and we began to understand the power of what we had achieved.”

It gained a powerful personal meaning too.

When Biswas first returned to India, after her graduation, she learned that her grandmother had been a well-known devotee of Kali, and was taken to see the remnants of where she had lived.

“I was given a print of Kali she had saved specifically for me,” Biswas says. “What was bizarre was that the goddess figure was wearing an almost identical print to the one I had represented in Housewives, which was based on an old Miss Selfridge top I liked to wear. That really blew me away.”

Family permeates her work.

Becoming a mother was a great milestone in her artistic career. Her son appears in a mesmerising film work, Birdsong (2004), in which a horse appears, as if by magic, inside a country house, quietly watched by the little boy.

“It’s based on the first joined-up sentence my son said, wanting a horse inside the living room,” she says, with the film acting as a kind of wish fulfilment, a triumph of imagination over convention.

“I had this extraordinary insight of remembering my own childhood through my son, which was pivotal for me in a way. It changed my life.”

A new film work, Lumen (2020–21), is the centrepiece of upcoming solo shows at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and Baltic in Gateshead. It focuses on the lives of her maternal ancestors, including her mother and grandmother, as well as retracing her own journey, aged three, from Mumbai to the south coast of England.

“It is a story of three women, of leaving home, the trauma of that,” she explains. “In the film, the actor wears a blue sari which my mum brought with her when we moved, made of the most beautiful silk. She would sometimes wear it to read letters from home, blue aerograms, and she would weep, not noticing I was there.”

Finally, she says, minds are changing.

Her two graduate works will appear at Kettle’s Yard, as both continue to resonate, contributing to the conversations about race and empire she had hoped to invoke when she made them.

“I was 19 when I started making them, which shows that it’s taken a long time – too long – for our collective thinking to galvanise on why we must question colonial histories, its violence, and its impact on real lives,” she says. “People are starting to realise why it’s necessary. Why we can’t hang on to not seeing any more.”

Imogen Greenhalgh is Deputy Editor of RA Magazine.