A new exhibition showcases an artist who has spent four decades shattering Asian stereotypes and highlighting women’s untold stories
The artist Sutapa Biswas’s father was a legendary figure in her family: a Marxist agronomist who stood up to the government in west Bengal over environmental abuses, and smoked joints in a moonlit Taj Mahal (he broke in). Yet it is her mother’s experience that anchors the artist’s new docufiction film Lumen, about a woman who travelled alone with five children, following her husband to England to make a new life.
“She struggled,” Biswas says. “1960s Britain was racist. She really craved climbing trees or swimming in her sari.”