Otherwise Engaged: Part Two - Sutapa Biswas Lecture

Otherwise Engaged is delighted to announce a follow up lecture to the symposium of 3 Dec 2011, given by the artist Sutapa Biswas at the University of Leeds on Wednesday 9 May 2012, 4.30-6pm, in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies (Old Mining Building Lecture Theatre). Following on from the discussions of 3 Dec, and in particular Lubaina Himid’s keynote speech concerning the curating of The Thin Black Line at the ICA in 1985 in which Biswas exhibited, Biswas will be re-visiting the 2011/2012 Thin Black Line(s) exhibition at Tate Britain, also curated by Himid and in which Biswas featured.  The lecture forms part of the Fine Art series guest presentations.

Sutapa Biswas is an internationally known London based artist, and is a Reader in Fine Art and Cultural Studies at Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of The Arts London. Born in Santinekethan, India, she moved to England in 1966 at a young age where she has lived ever since. Biswas studied Fine Art and Art History (1981-85) also completing an option in the History and Philosophy of Science, at the University of Leeds, UK. Between 1988-1990, she was a postgraduate student of the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and thereafter was a research student at Royal College of Art, London (1996 – 1998). Biswas’s artworks have been widely exhibited, and venues include: Tate Modern, UK; Tate Britain, UK; Melbourne International Arts Festival 2006, Australia; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; 6^th Havana Biennial, Cuba; Expo Arte, Guadalajara, Mexico; Nara Roesler Gallery, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Lalit Kala Akademi / Gallery Espace, Delhi, India; Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, Budapest; Whitechapel Art Gallery, UK; Terrace Gallery and Harewood House, Yorkshire, 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.

Sutapa Biswas first came to prominence as an artist in 1985, after graduating from the University of Leeds, when at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, she exhibited two large artworks, Housewives with Steak-knives and The Only Good Indian…in a groundbreaking exhibition titled, The Thin Black Line, curated by her contemporary the artist Lubaina Himid, London. The exhibition was the first of its kind that included artworks by artists all of whom were British based women of African and Asian parentage, to be hosted in a major municipal British art gallery. Since this exhibition, Biswas is widely acknowledged as having been a central figure within the influential Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, in Britain, which as a ‘movement’ has played a key role internationally in shifting the parameters of a discourse challenging the Eurocentric nature of art history and artistic practices in relation to questions of modernism and aesthetics.

As an artist Sutapa Biswas has worked in a range of media, including painting, drawing, film, performance and also photography. Her artworks possess often, a stark but poetic resonance that is concerned with the relationship between art and politics, and questions of subjectivity in relation to identity, gender and race. Within her ouvre, Biswas’s particular interest in the temporal relationships between drawing and film on a formal level as spatial opposites, are closely linked to her interests in the concept of time itself, and what this constitutes in relation to histories.

Biswas 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, Film and Video Umbrella, UK. Biswas was a Fellow of the Banff Centre for the Arts (1990 / 1992), a recipient of The National Endowment for the Arts Award, USA (1998), and a nominee for the European Photography Award in 1992.