SUTAPA BISWAS, artist World Hope Forum | Pretty Brilliant Women in the Arts: Goddesses

Описание: Sutapa Biswas
When Sutapa Biswas arrived at the University of Leeds in the 1980s to pursue her art education, she was the first South Asian person to study art at the university and the first person of colour to graduate from this department. Sutapa’s family had immigrated to the UK as a result of the endangered political status of her father — a Marxist and an academic — in their home country of India. Her father’s daughter, Sutapa was not afraid to speak her mind and set about creating art which would combine iconography that fell outside of the Eurocentric curriculum’s reference points. In 1985 Sutapa completed her widely renowned mixed-media piece Housewives with Steak-knives in which the ­multi-limbed Hindu goddess Kali wields an angular weapon and is adorned with a necklace made of dictators’ heads. Composed upon a stark white background, Sutapa nods to Robert Raushenberg’s white paintings as a metaphor for the white institutional spaces of the British university and gallery system, a stark contrast to the goddesses captivating presence: “What I love about Kali is that she’s so transgressive. It is still considered fearful for women to be possessive of themselves – sexually, powerfully, intellectually – but a figure like Kali gives us permission to be and do just that. She’s the goddess of war, but also peace, and I love that she’s both feminine and masculine. I find her liberating, and the density of melanin in her skin just makes her even more so.”

@hummingbird_biswas