Traversing Time: An Interview with Sutapa Biswas, by Millie Walton

Excerpt: "British Indian artist Sutapa Biswas’ works across diverse media – drawing, film, photography and performance – to create artworks that engage with questions of identity, race and gender in relation to time, space and history.

This year, her extensive career will be celebrated through two major solo exhibitions at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. Here, Biswas speaks to Millie Walton about her interest in the subconscious, exploring ideas of displacement and privileging the female perspective.

You seem to move fluidly between different disciplines. Is there one that you’re particularly at home with?

I tend to work with the medium that feels most suitable to the concept behind the work when I’m making it, but I guess that my love of art and making art really began with drawing and also, my relationship to film. 

I think it would be fair to say that most children enjoy drawing as a kind of expressive mode of existing and being, and thinking. It’s a way of making something that describes or evokes words. One of the first drawings that my son ever made when he was really very young was this very abstract thing made with paint and paper and water, and of course, my immediate response was something like, “Oh, how beautiful! What’s the title or how would you describe it? What is it?” He said, “It’s air.” My son had really bad allergies to his immunisations and unfortunately, this led to bronchial problems for me when he was young and he became asthmatic quite early so air was really important to his life and it was a cause for some anxiety for both us and for him. That he found this way of expressing space in relation to himself was just an extraordinary thing to me and it took me right back to my earliest drawings and forms of expression, and also my earliest experience of watching film in a cinema. 

When we came first came to England, my Dad and my Mum would take us to see classic Indian cinema and I was only five or six so too young to really follow the narrative, but I do remember being incredibly taken by the scale of what I was seeing, of what I assumed were dark skinned bodies (the films were in black and white) on this enormous scale. It was a really exquisite thing in the sixties and early seventies that you could watch projected matter being thrown across time and space to kiss the surface of a cinematic screen. In the moment that you encounter a film, it is temporal, but also permanent so there is a kind of inverse relationship to drawing in that through the temporal activity of mark-making, it leaves something permanent on the page or surface. I believe that those those two materials have always been really primary to the way in which I’ve thought about existing and making art. [...]"