Sutapa Biswas’ FVU-commissioned work 'Lumen' (2021) is screening as part of the programme for “Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985-2025” at ICA London.

Join ICA for this special double-bill screening of Sutapa Biswas’s films Lumen (2021) and Kali (1983 – 85) followed by a Q&A with the artist. Made nearly 40 years apart, both films demonstrate Biswas’s enduring interests in subjectivity, postcolonialism and feminism.

Lumen is an arthouse film that begins with the story of a baby emerging from a womb, and ends on a note of departure, with its female protagonist about to embark on a journey across uncharted waters. In between, we are entrusted with a series of intimate scenes from a life, recounted in an episodic monologue whose dramatic ebb and flow is sharply illuminated by flashes of memory but indelibly haunted by fears and doubts. In part the journey in question is inspired by the one undertaken, six decades ago, by Biswas’s mother abruptly uprooting from India to England with her children due to political upheavals. In Biswas’s film Lumen, a female voice narrates a story that weaves between layers of archival material and newly filmed footage, drawing past and present together through voices both imagined and real.

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Co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art with Art Fund support through the Moving Image Fund for Museums. The commission has been additionally supported by Autograph. Supported by Arts Council England.