Sutapa Biswas’s two channel video ‘Birdsong’ (2004), produced in collaboration with Film and Video Umbrella, is currently exhibiting as part of “Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985-2025” at ICA London.

The major group exhibition, curated by Lubaina Himid, celebrates 40 years since The Thin Black Line, the groundbreaking group show of young Black and Asian women artists at the ICA in 1985. 

Sutapa Biswas’ Birdsong sets up a delicate call-and-response between twin screens, unfolding dream-like images with quiet intensity. A child’s paper mobile evokes reverie, while a sudden horse in a bourgeois living room introduces a jolt of Freudian fantasy. Blending the familiar with the surreal, Biswas reveals the eerie undercurrents of everyday life. 

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Birdsong was an Iniva Touring Exhibition produced in collaboration with Film and Video Umbrella and supported by Arts Council England Grants for National Touring, the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the University of Southampton, Chelsea College of Art and Design, Magnesium Elektron and The Culture Company.