31/10/2021 Bring a jacket, it’s (the) Baltic.

*Please note that the dates and publishing of some texts may not line up as they were kept in a private document before posting.*

**For this text, all relevant images will be included at the end**

Last Sunday, I’d made a trip to Newcastle, mainly to just see a different space, after months of being locked in the one place, but also to see Sutapa Biswas’ exhibition at the Baltic Gallery there.

The first time I’ve visited, the gallery is huge and even for a Sunday seemed to be really busy. While I was there and seeing the art, I was also seeing something I realised I don’t often see in galleries in Scotland; it was busy, but full of families, and everyday people. Though it was filled with contemporary art, it didn’t feel stuffy or empty, like the Scottish city galleries often do. I liked it. It felt inviting.

When we walked in, I was forcibly made to take the stairs as its home to a permanent work by Mark Wallinger. ‘Heaven and Hell’, which is a mirror on the bottom floor in the middle of the staircase and one on the ceiling at the top of the staircase, creates the illusion that the stairs in this gallery could go on forever – up to heaven or down to hell. It was disorientating, first because of the distortion of the space and time, but also because this was a work I’d seen pictures of often as a student, never really paying attention to where it was, but id just stumbled across it without knowing it would be there- other than being shoved into the stairwell by my partner.

On the slow trudge up this never-ending staircase, we came to the first floor which housed ‘equal play’ by Albert Potrony. Filled with children and families, this was a space we kind of glazed over. It was an interesting investigation of genderless play, and the importance of this play in early development, but it wasn’t what we came to see.

The next floor had a black and white photography exhibition by Phyllis Christopher, reflecting on work made during the aids epidemic in New York, focussed on the representation of lesbian life. We spent some time here, taking in the images, trying but always failing to imagine what this life would be like (as heterosexual cis-gendered Scottish folks). But it gave as a window into a time and place that existed, and tried to show us what it was like through this documentary photography. I enjoyed the intimacy of it all, except for one image. I struggle with this photography of a faceless woman wearing a dollar bill stuffed bikini, lying on a table, with laughing/smiling women surrounding her. They seem like they are having fun in the photo, but I can’t help putting myself in the position of the woman and wonder if I’m having fun. I picture the image with men surrounding the woman and how does that warp the image. These are merely my own projections onto the image, and things that I doubt (And hope) that the photographer didn’t intend, but given the current climate of women’s unsafety in nightclub and bar atmospheres, its something I cant help about. It also makes me consider my representations of the female body in my own work. Is it fetishistic like this? Are these the kind of things I would want my viewers to consider?

On the next trudge of the staircase, we came to the great hall I had been looking forward to seeing: Sutapa Biswas’ ‘Lumen’. Painted a navy blue and dimly lit, except for spotlighting onto the artworks, we stepped into a series of four images where Biswas had projected onto her own body, images of buildings and locations she had visited when first returning to India after migrating to the UK. Without looking closely, in the dark space and the dark images, you wouldn’t even notice they were onto her body. It created an intimacy between body and space, the unseen birthplace that is tattooed beneath the skin.

There were then two videos; one to the left and one to the right. To the left, Biswas interviews some children in 2006 about what they think ‘the world expects’ of them, and to the right sculpted birds burn in what appears to be an English country house. An interesting juxtaposition for me, as someone who was 7 years old to now, what I would have thought was expected of me, to the state of society we are living in now – something I don’t think I will have to detail out in this particular review.

Behind the wall holding the images of Biswas body being projected on, there was another video work on a large screen and yet another parallel to it at the back. Behind that wall, another video work. These three works played in a sequence, one ending and another beginning, moving us through the space. An interesting curatorial decision as I can see why it was done this way, but when there wasn’t a video playing, it felt like a lot of empty, potentially wasted space. Especially if you are not someone who sticks around to see video works.

On the right-hand wall here, there was a serious of large photographic prints of stills from the video at the very back of the room and the titular work of the exhibition ‘Lumen’. This prepped us to see the video, we were intrigued by the seemingly random props, the woman standing in a Sari in a traditionally English looking house, it prepped us for some tough questions and harsh truths surrounding the English colonisation of India, that the video was presumably going to question.

We weren’t too interested by the video that was playing when we came in – we had caught the tail end of the first one, a two-channel video where we see steam rising from buildings in Japan, making it seem as though the city is on fire but continues round about it. The one currently playing was a discussion of Motherhood, by way of the artist sons first sentence – asking if a horse could live with them.

So we milled about waiting on Lumen to begin. We looked at the prints and parts of the video. Were drawn in by the eerie atmosphere of the space and the work. I had only one complaint of the exhibition and this is where Im going to air it: I was taken out of this eerie atmosphere by the paintings of birds on the left-hand wall. I read about them from the handout realising they referenced the colonial images of taxidermy birds, and could try to reckon with them by their significance, but they took me away from the intensity of the visuals in the rest of the works. Perhaps there were too many of them, I’m unsure, but they just seemed to sit disjointedly from the rest of the work and became a bit off putting.

Moving on, we got to see Lumen, a new video inspired by the artists boat journey from Mumbai to Dover, a young Indian women recites a monologue detailing the colonial histories of India and England, the maritime history and the journeys made between the two places. Personal histories of the artist and known fact intercept together between the images of the woman speaking, reflected in a mirror, and footage produced in India that seems to reflect this colonial time. The woman makes unbreaking eye contact with herself and the camera through the mirror, challenging all of us to our beliefs about the atrocities committed by the English colonists.

A scene where the woman pulls a length of cotton from her mouth sits with me still. Unbreaking her eye-contact, emphasising the associations of cotton and race and history, and I wonder how we can personally contribute to positive reparations. But I also think that my first and continual job here is to listen, to understand, to acknowledge, and then act accordingly.

I’m still digesting the work. Still maintaining the eye contact.

Even as we went up yet again, to the final floor, which was filled with bright colours, sculptures paintings and bean bags, an exhibition created to also be a classroom, I was still one floor below thinking of the eeriness and the significance of the body, the work that a body can do, and what that body can represent.

So, I came away from these exhibitions thinking about the physical body and its histories as well as its futures. How can I in my practice, make sure to be speaking about the feminine body with authority, without speaking over anyone. Its something I think about often anyway, but its fresh in my mind again. I’m also thinking about the technical and curatorial aspects again, how the eeriness was created in the room, the images that weren’t bodies sitting alongside the ones that were, but all still contributing to a real human understanding of a social-political, identity-based issue.

These are things I need to keep on revisiting and reflecting on in my practice and visiting exhibitions as beautifully done as this one reminds me to continue with this self-work.

To wrap up in the way I will continue when discussing exhibitions after the last mid-week reflection, was Sutapa Biswas ‘Lumen’ exhibition just shit in a room? Definitely not! (and also if you stuck with this writing for this long, thanku so much 😊)