LUMEN : SUTAPA BISWAS AT KETTLES YARD
Delightful Sutapa Biswas
Housewives with Steak Knives. was this artist’s dramatic first work from Art School in Leeds. Based on a version of the fury of the goddess Khali , deity of destruction, it springs in an eight foot high effigy from the wall of the gallery. It was the beginning of a long creative life by the now celebrated artist Sutapa Biswas, showing at Kettles Yard. Her latest work is centred on film, Years on from her original paintings Lumen has a subtle considered quality , complex narrative ( three generations are implied in the one narrator) and alongside its beautiful shots of the landscape and several ancient interiors, a moving story to tell.
Lumen is shown alongside the two dimensional images paintings and photographs, Within it , Sutapa Biswas presents herself, her life and her superlative art . Galleries can be formal and even bleak places but the presence of this artist added vitality to its first showing . This poet and painter, filmmaker and story teller was ready to engage with all comers.at the opening and I can report The Cambridge Critique lost no time in meeting this ultra charming direct and bold artist.
The charm of her personality shines from the pictures on display. In them her life is laid bare. Born in India, she was transplanted to London at the age of our four she left a life of colour and freedom for the grey restrictions of urban life where ‘ our mother kept us very close’. All the exuberance of the world she left is there in her splurges of impassioned colour. And family in its vibrant assertion is there too, pictures of mother, sister friends
Wearing a sari from Sutapa’s family collection ; a still from Lumen
Sutapa looks far too young for her intimacy with the struggles against racism and colonialism. She has ranged around with her confrontation of injustice even within the United States of America. An admirer of Angela Davis and Black Power movement, she also aware of the 1950s painting of the decade of her birth, the 50s,
A still from the wonderful Lumen
The multi generational Lumen a film at Kettles Yard before it launches
In Lumen, what appears to be a simple story is suffused with a deep critique of Orientalism, a concept made famous by the writer Edward Said, who Sutapa told me she read with increasing fervour when she was a student. It is the myth that conquered people were lazy sensual, cruel and indifferent to suffering- so that Europeans colonial invasion could claim to be a simple act of rescue or modernising. Thus the rampage of over India’s resources is justifiable, even honourable. The intriguing film includes hitherto unseen footage .
Made in 2021 this film with its eloquent expression of pain and separation is a classic deserving - by virtue of its professionalism, to be widely seen on general releases.
