Sutapa Biswas: Birdsong
Sutapa Biswas, Birdsong, 2004. Production still. 16mm film transferred onto 2 dvds. Dual screen projection. Colour, no sound. Duration: 7 minutes 7 seconds. Dimensions: variable. Made possible with the generous support of Iniva (London), Film and Video Umbrella (London), Grants for National Touring (ACE), AHRC (UK). © Sutapa Biswas. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2020.
“Looking across more than two decades of her distinctive artistic practice, there is one continuous and recurring subject matter that emerges forcefully from Sutapa Biswas’s work: time. Not linear time that moves sequentially from beginning to end. Nor present time, unhinged from the past. Time, in Biswas’s work, is fleeting and elusive and yet capable of changing everything irrevocably, over and over again. The fragile, metallic birds in her most recent film, Magnesium Bird, are ignited and metamorphose before our eyes, almost beyond recognition. The small boy who sits waiting, staring expectantly out towards the camera in Birdsong, awaits a magical happening that transforms his immediate, everyday world. In these works, Biswas’s lens captures a quality of time and light that finds echoes in the great paintings of Vermeer, Stubbs and Hopper.
From her earliest paintings of the 1980s through to her more recent film works, Biswas has been preoccupied with the search to push representation beyond the secure confines of describing the physical world to embody the pleasure and pain of lived experience. In these new works, Biswas takes this search further to produce poetic works that are magical and compelling.
From Sutapa Biswas: Birdsong, London and Portland, Oregon: Iniva and Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, 2004, published to coincide with the exhibition Sutapa Biswas: Birdsong, Café Gallery Projects, London; Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham; Harewood House and Leeds City Art Gallery, Leeds; and Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Portland, Oregon, 2004-2005.