Supra Biwas was born in Shantiniketan, West Bengal, India, in 1962. At the age of four, she moved to London, England with her family. Between 1981 and 1985 she studied at the University of Leeds. She then studied art at the Slade School of Art in London from 1988 to 1990.Between 1996 and 1998 Biswas studied at the Royal College of Art.
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 30-minute video that 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.
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; it 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 of Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.
Zoom link to attend: https://otis.zoom.us/j/92235820715.
