Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025

Join us for this special double-bill screening of Sutapa Biswas’s films Lumen (2021) and Kali (1983 – 85) followed by a Q&A with the artist. Made nearly 40 years apart, both films demonstrate Biswas’s enduring interests in subjectivity, postcolonialism and feminism.

Lumen is an arthouse film that begins with the story of a baby emerging from a womb, and ends on a note of departure, with its female protagonist about to embark on a journey across uncharted waters. In between, we are entrusted with a series of intimate scenes from a life, recounted in an episodic monologue whose dramatic ebb and flow is sharply illuminated by flashes of memory but indelibly haunted by fears and doubts. In part the journey in question is inspired by the one undertaken, six decades ago, by Biswas’s mother abruptly uprooting from India to England with her children due to political upheavals. In Biswas’s film Lumen, a female voice narrates a story that weaves between layers of archival material and newly filmed footage, drawing past and present together through voices both imagined and real.
 
Kali is an early work of Biswas's, made while she was an undergraduate studying Fine Art and Art History at The University of Leeds, which was first publicly screened as part of The Thin Black Line at the ICA in 1985. It documents and speaks to a performance by Biswas, playing herself and Kali, the Hindu goddess of time and change, and a fellow student playing herself and a character representing evil. A little after the performance starts, the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, Biswas’s tutor at the time, is ushered into the space, hooded by a pillowcase with holes cut out for her to witness Biswas’s actions. As Biswas describes in the introduction, this work is borne from her own ‘marginalisation and tokenisation as a black woman’ within the fine art department at Leeds University, also explaining that the performance is ‘about performance itself. Who performs? Who spectates? It questions who is in control and who is not’. Pollock who described how, in Kali, she was not a witness or spectator but part of its subject and spectacle, subsequently published that it was Biswas’s work as an undergraduate student that changed the course of how art history was taught at the university where Pollock had been Biswas’s tutor.
 
Programme: 

Lumen, Sutapa Biswas, 2021, 30 min. 

Kali, Sutapa Biswas, 1983 – 85, 23 min 15 sec. 

Q&A with Sutapa Biswas. 

Image: Sutapa Biswas, Lumen (still), 2021. 8K and 4K authored onto 4K, 5.1 sound (stereo option), 30 min. Made possible with the generous support of Film and Video Umbrella, Bristol Museums, Art Fund UK's Moving Image Fund, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, BALTIC, Gateshead, Autograph Abp, and ACE. © Sutapa Biswas. All Rights Reserved. DACS 2025. 

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