Sutupa Biswas' Birdsong shows at this anniversary exhibition marking 70 years of The School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds.

Initiating a finely poised call-and-response between a pair of near-identical projection screens, Sutapa Biswas’ Birdsong circles through a cluster of dream-like images of slow-burning power and intensity. While the repeated motif of a child’s paper mobile instils a mood of delicate reverie, the sudden, hallucinatory appearance of a fully-grown horse in the midst of a typically bourgeois living room lends a frisson of Freudian fantasy. Ruffling the illusion of domestic tranquillity with a note of mystery and ambiguity, Biswas collides the familiar and the unfamiliar to capture something of the strangeness that lurks behind the surface of ordinary, everyday reality.

In 1949, Yorkshire-born modernist Herbert Read, alongside Bonamy Dobrée, Professor of English at the University of Leeds, proposed a Department of Fine Art to the University. It is now the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies and also includes museum, heritage and curatorial studies.

Seventy years later this exhibition reflects on their radical plan. Experimental in form, the show offers a chorus of voices and media across campus. It is co-curated by Sam Belinfante and Griselda Pollock.

The exhibition takes place across two venues, with work displayed at both The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery and the Project Space at The School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies. The opening hours for the Project Space are Tuesday to Saturday, 10:00am to 4:00pm. Closed Sundays and Mondays.