Sutapa Biswas (born 28 November 1962) is a British Indian conceptual artist, who works across a range of media including painting, drawing, film and time-based media.

Early life
She was born in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, India, in 1962. At the age of four, she moved to London, England, with her family, and grew up in Southall. Between 1981 and 1985 she studied at the University of Leeds for her BFA. She then studied art the Slade School of Art in London from 1988-1990. From 1996 to 1998, Biswas studied at the Royal College of Art.

Career
As a conceptual artist, Biswas works in a variety of mediums, including performance, film, photography and installation. During the 1980s, Biswas was primarily a painter. For instance, her paintings Housewives with Steak-Knives (1985) and Through Rose-Tinted Windows form part of the Bradford Museums and Galleries permanent collections on display at Cartwright Hall. She also worked in video. Kali (1984) is a thirty-minute video that the artist Sutapa Biswas made while a student at the University of Leeds. It documents a performance by the artist as Kali and her fellow student as Ravan. Kali – whose name means the ‘black one’ – is the Hindu goddess of time and change and within Hindu mythology she was created to inhabit more than one representation (hence her multiple appearances in the performance) to rid the world of evil, which is here embodied by Ravan. Biswas often draws from myths and iconography from ancient Hindu mythologies, speaking of the symbolism she says 'I want people to research into my culture, as I've been doing into European and Western culture'. In 1985, Biswas's work was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in the exhibition The Thin Black Line, an exhibition of young Black and Asian women artists curated by Lubaina Himid.

Sutapa Biswas's works often reflect on questions of gender and cultural and ethnic identity. For instance, her film Birdsong captures the story of young Indian boy who longs to own a horse and is filmed against the backdrop of an English period home. Biswas is also keen to use humour and satire in her work. In her painting 'The Last Mango in Paris' depicting two women talking and peeling mangos the caption below reads. M: 'If you were to be re-born, and had a choice what would you come back as?' B: 'If I were to be reborn again, I would be born an English dog, because in England they look after their dogs really well.'''  She is keen to use her work as a platform for people to begin to address their own racism. Biswas was the 2008 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Yale Centre for British Art, and is a European Photography Award nominee. She is currently a Reader Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Collections
Biswas' work is held in the following public collection:
Tate, London

Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions
1987 Sutapa Biswas, Horizon Gallery, London
1992 Synapse:'' Sutapa Biswas, The Photographers' Gallery, London, (texts by Gilane Twaadros and David Chandler).
2021 'Lumen', Sutapa Biswas, BALTIC Contemporary
2021 'Lumen' Sutapa Biswas, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge

Group exhibitions 
1985 The Thin Black Line, [Selected by Lubaina Himid], Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
1986 The Issue of Painting, Rochdale Art Gallery.
1986 Jagrati, Greenwich Citizens Gallery, London
1986 Unrecorded Truths, The Elbow Room, London
1987 Creation For Liberation 4th Open Exhibition: Art by Black Artists, Brixton Village, London
1987 Critical Realism: Britain in the 1980’s through the Work of 28 Artists, Nottingham Castle Museum, Nottingham
1987 State Of The Art: Ideas And Images in The 1980s, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
1987 The Image Employed: The Use of Narrative in Black Art
1988 Along the Lines of Resistance: an Exhibition of Contemporary Feminist Art, [Selected by Sutapa Biswas, Sarah Edge and Clare Slattery], Cooper Gallery, Barnsley 
1988 The Essential Black Art, Chisenhale Gallery, London
1988 Graven Images: Art, Religion and Politics, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston 
1989 Fabled Territories: New Asian Photography in Britain, City Art Gallery, Leeds
1989 The Artist Abroad: An Exhibition of Work Influenced by International Travel, Usher Gallery, Lincoln 
1989 Intimate Distance, The Photographers’ Gallery, London
1989 The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, Hayward Gallery, London
1990 Disputed Identities, Camerawork, San Francisco
1992 Fine Material for a Dream...?: A Reappraisal of Orientalism: 19th & 20th Century Fine Art and Popular Culture Juxtaposed with Paintings, Video and Photography by Contemporary Artists, Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston 
1992 The Circular Dance, Arnolfini, Bristol
1992 Who Do You Take Me For?, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane
1993 Beyond Destination: Film and Video Installations by South Asian Artists, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
1993 Disrupted Borders, Arnolfini, Bristol

References

1962 births
Living people
Feminist artists
People from Birbhum district
Indian emigrants to England
Alumni of the University of Leeds
Alumni of the Slade School of Fine Art
Alumni of the Royal College of Art
English people of Bengali descent
Artists from London