Mata Ne (See You Soon)
Project description
Mata Ne (See You Soon) is a solo exhibition by British-Indian artist Sutapa Biswas (b. 1962, Shantiniketan, West Bengal), presented at Fujiya Gallery in Beppu. The exhibition brings together video and mixed-media works developed during a two-month residency as part of the Kashima Artist in Residence 2015, commissioned and produced by Beppu Project NPO with support from the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan.
Born in Shantiniketan, where her father, an ecologist, was teaching at Visva-Bharati University, Biswas moved with her family to London in 1966. This experience of movement between India and Britain has informed a practice concerned with displacement, belonging and the ways in which personal histories intersect with larger geopolitical and colonial narratives. Working across painting, drawing, film, video, photography and installation, Biswas’s work is characterised by a stark yet poetic resonance and an enduring interest in the human condition.
Rooted in autobiographical and oral history practices, Mata Ne centres on the personal testimonies of women from Oita Prefecture. Through intimate storytelling, the women recount pivotal moments from their lives, bringing attention to overlooked and marginalised histories and challenging dominant narratives within Japanese national history. The project creates a space for women’s voices, foregrounding experiences of labour, migration, memory and survival across both public and domestic spheres.
For Biswas, oral testimony becomes a form of resistance and collective memory. Individual recollections are not treated as isolated accounts, but as fragments through which broader histories of identity, geography, gender and belonging can emerge. Her interest lies particularly in the points where larger historical narratives collide with personal stories that are often undocumented or excluded from official histories.
Biswas describes her approach as “spatial storytelling”: an exploration of the ways in which geography, identity and memory are interconnected. Her works frequently consider the relationship between people and the places they inhabit, while drawing on poetry, literature, film and art history alongside lived experience. Throughout this practice, the female gaze remains a powerful presence, offering alternative ways of seeing and remembering spaces shaped by social, political and historical forces.
This approach is also evident in Biswas’s wider body of work, including Housewives with Steak-knives (1983–85), Birdsong (2004) and Lumen (2021), in which she interrogates the complexities of racial and gendered power relations emerging from tangled colonial histories, particularly those connecting India and Europe. Across these works, light and shadow, presence and absence become both aesthetic and conceptual devices through which ideological spaces and inherited narratives are simultaneously unpicked, reclaimed and reconstituted.
Mata Ne (See You Soon) extends this sustained investigation into narratives that emerge from the margins. Through poetic imagery, testimony and personal reflection, the project considers how histories are constructed, transmitted and remembered. The women’s voices gathered in Oita become part of a wider meditation on displacement, home, belonging and power, while inviting the viewer to reflect on how personal identity is itself shaped by the places, histories and relationships through which we move.
Like thread unraveling and ravelling through fabric, Biswas’s practice moves across time and space, weaving together the personal and the historical, the intimate and the geopolitical. Mata Ne asks us to attend to these connections: to the stories that remain, the stories that disappear, and the possibilities of recovering or reconstituting histories through acts of listening, remembering and seeing.
Bio
Sutapa Biswas (b. 1962, Shantiniketan, West Bengal) is a British-Indian artist based in London. Her interdisciplinary practice spans painting, drawing, film, video, photography, installation and mixed media, exploring colonial histories, gender, race, class, memory, identity and the human condition.
Drawing on autobiographical experience, oral history, poetry, literature, film and art history, Biswas is particularly interested in the relationship between personal narratives and larger historical structures. Her work often examines how histories of migration and displacement intersect with questions of belonging, power and place, with a sustained focus on experiences that have been marginalised or excluded from dominant narratives.
Biswas has exhibited internationally at institutions including Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, Whitechapel Gallery, Neuberger Museum in New York and Yale University Art Gallery, as well as at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Havana Biennial and Iniva. In 2014–15, she was the Tate Artist in Residence for RadioCity and collaborated with artist Mary Kelly on Tate’s online project On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Period of Time (2015).
In 2021, Biswas presented a critically acclaimed solo exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, bringing renewed attention to her longstanding contribution to British contemporary art.
Project details
Year: 2015
Artist: Sutapa Biswas
Exhibition: Mata Ne (See You Soon)
Venue: Fujiya Gallery, Beppu
Curated by: Keith Whittle
Residency: Kashima Artist in Residence 2015
Programme Director: Keith Whittle
Commissioned and produced by: Beppu Project NPO
Support: Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan
Country: Japan