Sutapa Biswas was born in Santiniketan (now part of Bolpur), India, in 1962. Her family moved to London in 1966 and she studied art in Leeds and London before establishing a successful career working across a range of media, primarily in conceptual art.
Multimedia conceptual artist and curator Sutapa Biswas was born in Santiniketan (now part of Bolpur), West Bengal, India, in 1962. Her father was an academic at Bharati University, Santinikethan, before political circumstances in India forced the family to leave, moving to London, England, in 1966, when Biswas was aged three and a half. Biswas went on to study Fine Art and History of Art, and the History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of Leeds (1981-85). She then completed a postgraduate degree at the Slade School of Fine Art in London (1989-90), and undertook practice-based doctoral research at the Royal College of Art (1996-98). Although she began her career as a painter, Biswas has worked across a wide range of media, including painting and drawing, installation, film and video, photography, and performance. She draws inspiration from Hindu iconography, oral histories, and art historical and literary sources, including the writings of Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Edward Lear, Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalysis, and paintings by Johannes Vermeer, Artemesia Gentileschi, Edward Hopper and George Stubbs, among others. Her work explores colonial history, feminism, cultural identity, race, gender, memory and desire in relation to time and space, and to systems of knowledge and power, challenging the viewer to restructure the way they think about deeper historical, religious, political, gendered and personal discourses. She has an interest in the ways in which larger historical narratives collide with personal narratives, including examining past and present political dynamics between Britain and India. She has said: 'Though much time has passed since my journey from the country of my birth to a country that is now my home, the complex relationship that has existed between these two places for centuries now, has given way to a certain poetry that belongs to both of them, which inevitably has consequently entered my psyche' (artist statement for the Feminist Art Base, Brooklyn Museum).
Biswas was a key figure within the Black British Arts Movement of the 1980s, addressing Britain's colonial past and the prejudices within art history through works such as Housewives with Steak-Knives (1985) and the performance KALI (1984) staged with her fellow student at Leeds University, Isabelle Tracey, and featuring her tutor, renowned cultural historian Griselda Pollock. Biswas' work came to wider prominence in 1985, when it was featured in The Thin Black Line(s), an exhibition by young Black and Asian women artists at the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, curated by artist Lubaina Himid.
Biswas' works have been exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions in the UK at The Photographer's Gallery, London; INIVA, London; and Plugin Contemporary Art Gallery with Locus+, and Horizon Gallery, London. For RadioCity at Tate Britain (2014-15), she explored identity and migration in a sound, installation and performance piece titled Flights of Passage. She has represented Britain at various international platforms including the Havana Biennial in Cuba alongside fellow British artists Bill Woodrow and Sokari Douglas Camp in 1997. Group shows include A Missing History: The Other Story - Revisited at Aicon Gallery, London, in 2010, and The Place is Here at South London Gallery, London, in 2017. Her work was also featured in Ben Uri's online exhibition Midnight's Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain in 2020. A solo exhibition spanning her extensive career was held at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, in 2021-22, where she premiered a new film, Lumen, filmed in India and England, presenting a semi-fictional narrative of migration overlapping with broader maritime, trading, colonial and post-colonial histories.
Throughout her career Biswas has held various artists residencies and received numerous international awards. She was a European Photography Award nominee in 1992; Visiting Artist and Fellow at the Yale Center For British Art, Yale University in 2009, receiving the Center's Visiting Scholars Award in 2019-20 and The Art Fund 2019 Award in collaboration with Film and Video Umbrella, London, and Bristol Museum. In 2015, she was the Kashima Artist in Residence in Japan. Biswas has also taught fine art and art history, including at Chelsea College of Art and Design (University of the Arts London), and is currently a Reader in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University. She held board memberships at INIVA from 1996-98 and at Film and Video Umbrella UK from 2009-13. Sutapa Biswas lives and works in London and Manchester. Her work is held in UK public collections including Tate Modern, Bradford Museums and Galleries, Arts Council England and The Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, Leeds University. Biswas has been commissioned by the charity, Hospital Rooms, to create murals for the Highgate Mental Health Centre (2017)and Springfield University Hospital (2022); a related work featured in a group exhibition at the Holding Rooms, Hauser & Wirth, London (2023).
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Sutapa Biswas]
Publications related to [Sutapa Biswas] in the Ben Uri Library