Sutapa Biswas

Sutapa Biswas (b.1961 Santiniketan, India) is a British Indian conceptual artist, who works across a range of media including painting, drawing, film and time-based media. Her practice questions the complexities of racial and gendered power relations born out of tangled colonial histories and Biswas has developed a powerful language in her practice that transcends questions of histories, time, and space. 

Biswas participated in the emergence of the Black Arts Movement in Britain in the mid-1980s being selected immediately following her graduation for the landmark exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid, Thin Black Line at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1985. Her work ‘Housewives with Steak-Knives’ has become an iconic work of the Black Arts Movement, exhibited widely since it was made in 1985, most recently at Tate Britain in the exhibition ‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-90’

Since her emergence in the 1980s Biswas has made work that is richly allusive and poetic, meditating on cultural and gendered identities as well as the passage of time. The art historian Griselda Pollock has observed of Biswas’s oeuvre: “Her work reframes that past through the lens of a contemporary child transplanted under political exile to England in the 1960s as Britain unevenly confronted its own past and, at times, still violently inhospitable present. Using the beauty of her deep artistic intelligence, Sutapa Biswas seduces us into ethical reflection with deep personal affects.”

She has exhibited extensively internationally, and her recent solo shows include Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge University (2022), Autograph, London (2022), the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2021), the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2000), Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (2004), and the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, Oregon (2006). 

She is currently in the major group exhibition ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ at Tate Britain. Other significant group exhibitions includ ‘The Thin Black Line’ (ICA, London, 1985). ‘The Essential Black Art’ (Chisenhale Gallery, 1989), Beyond Destination (Ikon Gallery, 1994), ‘Transforming the Crown (Brooklyn Museum, 1997), the 6th Havana Biennale, (Cuba, 1997),  The Unmapped Body: 3 Black British Artists, (Yale University Art Gallery, 1998), ‘The Place is Here’ (Nottingham Contemporary, 2016) and ‘Tantra: From Enlightenment to Revolution’ (The British Museum, 2020).