Sutapa Biswas
Biography
Sutapa Biswas is an internationally known London-based artist, and Reader in Fine Art and Cultural Studies at Chelsea. Born in Santinekethan, India in 1966, she moved to England at a young age, where she has lived ever since. Biswas received her Bachelors Degree from the University of Leeds, studying Fine Art and Art History (1981–85), with a History and Philosophy of Science option. Between 1988–90, she was a postgraduate student of the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London; and thereafter, at the Royal College of Art, London (1996–98). She was a Fellow at the Banff Centre for the Arts (1990/92), a recipient of The National Endowment for the Arts Award, USA (1998), and a nominee for the European Photography Award in 1992.
Biswas’s works have been widely exhibited. Venues include: Tate Modern, UK; Melbourne International Arts Festival 2006, Australia; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; 6th Havana Biennial, Cuba; Expo Arte, Guadalajara, Mexico; Nara Roesler Gallery, São Paulo, Brazil; Gallery Espace, Delhi, India; Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest; Whitechapel Art Gallery, UK; Angel Row Gallery, UK; City Art Gallery, Leeds, UK; Douglas Cooley Art Gallery, USA; Yale University Art Gallery, USA; Franklin H Williams Cultural Centre, New York, USA; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada.
She has been a Visiting Fellow and artist in many leading institutions, including: Yale University, USA; Yale British Art Centre, USA; The Whitney Programme, New York, USA; San Francisco Art Institute, USA; Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford University, UK; Stanford University, USA; Mills College, USA; Reed College, USA. She is currently a Member of the Board of Directors for the Film and Video Umbrella, UK.
Research statement
Sutapa Biswas works in a range of media, including drawing, film and photography. She is particularly interested in the temporal relationships between drawing and film, in that for her they formally represent spatial opposites. Biswas’s works often possess a stark but poetic resonance that broadly centres on questioning the relationship between art and politics, exploring themes of time and history in relation to questions of subjectivity, identity, gender and race. Biswas first came to prominence in 1985, when she exhibited a large painting, Housewives with steak knives, in a groundbreaking exhibition entitled The Thin Black Line, curated by the artist Lubaina Himid and hosted at the ICA, London. For 25 years, Biswas’s works have played a key role internationally in shifting the parameters of a discourse that challenges the Eurocentric nature of art history and criticism, and artistic practices, in relation to questions of modernism.
Biswas is currently developing new works for forth-coming solo exhibitions in London, and India.
Selected Outputs and Achievements
Recent relevant outputs
Her work recently featured in: Graves Gallery, Museums Sheffield, UK; Twenty-One, Terrace Gallery and Harewood House, UK; A Missing History: ‘The Other Story’ Re-visited, Aicon Gallery, London, UK; British Subjects: Identity and Self-fashioning 1967–2009, Neuberger Museum, New York, USA; Lo Real Maravilloso, Lalit Kala Akademy, Delhi, India; Audio Arts Archive, Tate Britain, UK.
Biswas’s conference paper, Through the Looking-Glass: Questions of Governance, The Art School in Crisis, was selected by Tate as part of their panel session ‘Art School Educated: Rethinking Art Education in the 21st Century’ for the AAHC 2011.
A monograph of Biswas’s work, including essays by Laura Mulvey, Griselda Pollock and Guy Brett, is published by inIVA (ISBN 1-899846- 39-5), 2004.
