Sutapa Biswas | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 28 November 1962 Shantiniketan, India |
| Alma mater | University of Leeds, Slade School of Art, Royal College of Art |
Sutapa Biswas (born 28 November 1962) is a British Indian conceptual artist, who works across a range of media including painting, drawing, film and time-based media. [1]
She was born in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, India, in 1962. [2] At the age of four, she moved to London, England, with her family, [2] and grew up in Southall. [3] Between 1981 and 1985 she studied at the University of Leeds for her BFA. [2] She then studied art the Slade School of Art in London from 1988-1990. [2] From 1996 to 1998, Biswas studied at the Royal College of Art. [2]
As a conceptual artist, Biswas works in a variety of mediums, including performance, film, photography [4] and installation. [2] During the 1980s, Biswas was primarily a painter. [5] For instance, her paintings Housewives with Steak-Knives (1985) and Through Rose-Tinted Windows form part of the Bradford Museums and Galleries permanent collections on display at Cartwright Hall. [6] She also worked in video. Kali (1984) is a thirty-minute video that the artist made while a student at the University of Leeds. It documents a performance by the artist as Kali and her fellow student as Ravan. Kali – whose name means the ‘black one’ – is the Hindu goddess of time and change and within Hindu mythology she was created to inhabit more than one representation (hence her multiple appearances in the performance) to rid the world of evil, which is here embodied by Ravan. Biswas often draws from myths and iconography from ancient Hindu mythologies, speaking of the symbolism she says 'I want people to research into my culture, as I've been doing into European and Western culture'. [7] In 1985, Biswas's work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in the exhibition The Thin Black Line, an exhibition of young Black and Asian women artists curated by Lubaina Himid . [8]
Sutapa Biswas's works often reflect on questions of gender and cultural and ethnic identity. [9] For instance, her film Birdsong captures the story of young Indian boy who longs to own a horse and is filmed against the backdrop of an English period home. [10] Biswas is also keen to use humour and satire in her work. [7] In her painting 'The Last Mango in Paris' depicting two women talking and peeling mangos the caption below reads. M: 'If you were to be re-born, and had a choice what would you come back as?' B: 'If I were to be reborn again, I would be born an English dog, because in England they look after their dogs really well.' [7] She is keen to use her work as a platform for people to begin to address their own racism. Biswas was the 2008 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art, and is a European Photography Award nominee. She is currently a Reader Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. [11]
Biswas' work is held in the following public collection:
Into the Open, subtitled "New Paintings, Prints and Sculptures by Contemporary Black Artists", was an exhibition of art by black artists displayed at various venues in the United Kingdom in 1984.
Modern Art Oxford is an art gallery established in 1965 in Oxford, England. From 1965 to 2002, it was called The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford.
Lesley Sanderson is a Malaysian British artist. Her work typically focuses on explorations of her duel-heritage identity and its relationship with art. Sanderson's work has been displayed in exhibitions internationally.
Dame Sonia Dawn Boyce is a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at University of the Arts London. Boyce's research interests explore art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. Boyce has been closely collaborating with other artists since 1990 with a focus on collaborative work, frequently involving improvisation and unplanned performative actions on the part of her collaborators. Boyce's work involves a variety of media, such as drawing, print, photography, video, and sound. Her art explores "the relationship between sound and memory, the dynamics of space, and incorporating the spectator". To date, Boyce has taught Fine Art studio practice for more than 30 years in several art colleges across the UK.
Sir Richard Sheridan Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin Bowling(né Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling; born 26 February 1934), known as Frank Bowling, is a British artist who was born in British Guiana. He is particularly renowned for his large-scale, abstract "Map" paintings, which relate to abstract expressionism, colour field painting and lyrical abstraction. Bowling has been described as "one of Britain’s greatest living abstract painters", as "one of the most distinguished black artists to emerge from post-war British art schools" and as a "modern master". British cultural critic and theorist Stuart Hall situates Bowling’s career within a first generation, or “wave” of post-war, Black-British art, one characterised by postwar politics and British decolonisation. He is the first black artist to be elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts.
Zarina Bhimji is a Ugandan Indian photographer, based in London. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007, exhibited at Documenta 11 in 2002, and is represented in the public collections of Tate, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Liverpool and the Black Atlantic was a season of citywide series of exhibitions and events initiated by Tate Liverpool exploring connections between cultures and continents.
Lubaina Himid is a British artist and curator. She is a professor of contemporary art at the University of Central Lancashire. Her art focuses on themes of cultural history and reclaiming identities.
Maud Sulter was a Scottish contemporary fine artist, photographer, writer, educator, feminist, cultural historian, and curator of Ghanaian heritage. She began her career as a writer and poet, becoming a visual artist not long afterwards. By the end of 1985 she had shown her artwork in three exhibitions and her first collection of poetry had been published. Sulter was known for her collaborations with other Black feminist scholars and activists, capturing the lives of Black people in Europe. She was a champion of the African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and was fascinated by the Haitian-born French performer Jeanne Duval.
Chisenhale Gallery is a non-profit contemporary art gallery based in London's East End. The gallery occupies the ground level of a former veneer factory on Chisenhale Road, situated in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, near Victoria Park and flanking the Hertford Union Canal. Housed in the same building are two other distinct initiatives: Chisenhale Studios and Chisenhale Dance Space, named also for the road on which they reside.
Veronica Maudlyn Ryan is a Montserrat-born British sculptor. She moved to London with her parents when she was an infant and now lives between New York and Bristol. In December 2022, Ryan won the Turner Prize for her 'really poetic' work.
Claudette Elaine Johnson is a British visual artist. She is known for her large-scale drawings of Black women and her involvement with the BLK Art Group, of which she was a founder member. She was described by Modern Art Oxford as "one of the most accomplished figurative artists working in Britain today". A finalist for the Turner Prize in 2024, Johnson was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts the same year.
Five Black Women was an exhibition at the Africa Centre, London, featuring the work of British artists Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Houria Niati and Veronica Ryan held in 1983. The exhibition was organised by Himid, the first of several "widely respected" exhibitions she organised featuring Black women artists.
The Other Story was an exhibition held from 29 November 1989 to 4 February 1990 at the Hayward Gallery in London. The exhibition brought together the art of "Asian, African and Caribbean artists in post war Britain", as indicated in the original title. It is celebrated as a landmark initiative for reflecting on the colonial legacy of Britain and for establishing the work of overlooked artists of African, Caribbean, and Asian ancestry. Curated by artist, writer, and editor Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story was a response to the "racism, inequality, and ignorance of other cultures" that was pervasive in the late-Thatcher Britain in the late 1980s. The legacy of the exhibition is significant in the museum field, as many of the artists are currently part of Tate's collections. The exhibition received more than 24,000 visitors and a version of the exhibition travelled to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, 10 March to 22 April 1990; and Manchester City Art Gallery and Cornerhouse, 5 May to 10 June 1990.
Brenda Patricia Agard was a Black-British photographer, artist, poet and storyteller who was most active in the 1980s, when she participated in some of the first art exhibitions organized by Black-British artists in the United Kingdom. Agard's work focused on creating "affirming images centred on the resilience of the Black woman," according to art historian Eddie Chambers.
Joseph Adekunle Olubo, was an artist and book illustrator active in the 1980s. He participated in some of the first art exhibitions organized by Black British artists in the United Kingdom. Olubo was one of 22 artists included in the 1983 inaugural exhibition, Heart in Exile, at The Black-Art Gallery, an art space in London which worked with artists of African and Caribbean backgrounds.
Young In Hong is a visual artist from Seoul, Korea, based in Bristol, England. Hong graduated with an MA and a PhD in Art from Goldsmith College in London UK in 2012. From 1992 to 1998, she studied Sculpture at Seoul National University. Hong currently works from her studio at Spike Island in Bristol and is represented by PKM Gallery in Seoul. She teaches at Bath School of Art as Reader in Performance and Textiles.
Nina Edge is an English ceramicist, feminist and writer.
Zoé Whitley is an American art historian and curator who has been director of Chisenhale Gallery since 2020. Based in London, she has held curatorial positions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate galleries, and the Hayward Gallery. At the Tate galleries, Whitley co-curated the 2017 exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which ARTnews called one of the most important art exhibitions of the 2010s. Soon after she was chosen to organise the British pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Amanda Bintu Holiday is a Sierra Leonean-British artist, filmmaker and poet.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
