Synaptic visualisations: reading ‘the global’ in and through the work of Sutapa Biswas

This essay focuses on the work of British contemporary artist Sutapa Biswas (born 1962). Over the past forty years, Biswas has engaged, through film, photography and other media, with the complex structures and aesthetics of the global, in relation to her own migratory experience. Having come to Britain from West Bengal as a child, the artist's return in the 1980s to the place of her birth precipitated a series of works that deal with the complexity of homeland and identity, memory and desire, while also challenging a Eurocentric vision of the world. Through an analysis of two film works, Kali (1984–85) and Birdsong (2004), and by focusing on Biswas's own conceptualization of the synaptic, this essay addresses the way in which the artist challenges idealized notions of post-colonial unity, while also pointing to the possibilities of seeing and knowing across different vantage points.