Introduction
In his text ‘Museums of Modern Art and the End of History’, Stuart Hall argues that the ‘post-colonial’ is not the end of colonialism but rather the reconvening of all the contradictions and problems which constituted colonialism in a new context.[footnote 1] Echoing this, contemporary artist Sutapa Biswas (b. 1962), whose work is the focus of this essay, has stated that she has come to dislike the term ‘post-colonial’ precisely because we are still ‘in the colonial’. [footnote 2]
Responding to the complicity of visual culture within the history of imperialism and within the enduring colonial project, Sutapa Biswas creates a visual language which challenges Euro-centric visions of the world by mobilizing her own complex subjectivity as a British-Indian woman. In 1986/87, twenty-one years after her family was displaced from their home in Santinikaten, West Bengal, Biswas made her first visit back to India, after which she produced a photographic series entitled Synapse (1992). Through this visually and conceptually complex work Biswas drew on her re-encounter with India, engaging with the inter-relation of identity and homeland, memory and desire while also challenging the colonizing gaze of the photographic image.
In the black-and-white photographs that comprise the Synapse series, Biswas brings her own body into image relation with ancient stone temples of Hindu culture (plate 1), drawing the attention of a British arts audience to representations of women which are neither violent nor othering. These temples, in their precolonial representations of an erotic, liberal sexuality provided a visual resource for her decolonizing, feminist artistic project. The artist’s engagement with Hindu iconography, as well as a range of cultural referents from India and other parts of the globe, has challenged the Eurocentricity of the history of art that was taught to Biswas as a student of fine art in a British university.
Beginning from her own experience of migration to Britain from a post-partition India, and of navigating the pain and pleasure of inhabiting two worlds, Biswas has, as Synapse exemplifies, consistently and deeply explored the potential of bringing together events, histories, spaces and experiences, in order to produce what Griselda Pollock and Mieke Bal have termed ‘a migratory aesthetics’.[footnote 3] In their conception, the term captures the way in which art forms provide knowledge of migration histories.
I wish to argue that Biswas’s own ‘migratory aesthetics’ hinges on her mobilization of the synaptic which not only makes visible the aesthetic dimension of migration, but – in relation to the focus of this special issue – can be read as one lens through which to visualize the potential and problematic of the global.
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