- Artists
“Sutapa Biswas makes an art of caustic beauty. For two decades her sharp eye and sure hand have worked hard to bring together the political and the aesthetic”. (Sandy Nairne, Director, National Portrait Gallery, London).
Sutapa Biswas has, in the last seventeen years, created an intensely evocative and challenging body of work, which has engaged with feminism and cultural identity. This international touring exhibition Birdsong comprises two new films, which explore the fluidity and mutability of memory within the context of rites of passage. Birdsong is a two-screen film installation with a horse in a domestic interior. Seen through the eyes of a child, this piece addresses the impossible reconciliation between dream, desire and reality. Shot at Harewood House, Leeds, Magnesium Bird is an ephemeral film charged with feelings of love, loss and trepidation.
Birdsong will tour initially to Angel Row, Nottingham. The films will also be shown over two venues at Leeds City Art Gallery and Harewood House, Leeds, simultaneously. Leeds City Art Gallery will show the two-screen projection Birdsong; Harewood House will show Magnesium Bird, filmed earlier on in the year in the 18th-century walled garden, alongside bird watercolours by J.M.W Turner, on special loan from Leeds City Art Gallery.