Sutapa Biswas

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 22 Number 4, 2004

Transcript

Jean Wainwright: Can we begin by just talking through your installation ’Bird Song’?

Sutapa Biswas: Yes, I started thinking about the piece almost four years ago when my son, Enzo, began to speak. In one of the first conversations I had with him he articulated; ’Mummy, I would like to have a horse’. And then he said: ‘I'd like it to live in my living room’. It was quite an extraordinary moment for me, the idea of the child's imagination and how for him it was possible that he could share that space with this horse. It motivated me. That was really the starting point. Around the same time, I'd been drawn to a painting by Stubbs Lord Holland and Lord Albemarle Shooting at Goodwood, painted in 1759. I think as an artist it's always very hard to distil exactly what influences takes you at any particular moment. You can't pretend that you've not been educated in a very art history heavy department. I studied at the University of Leeds under Grisselda Pollock, John Tag, Fred Orton and, of course, under the auspices of a department that was established by Tim Clark. Then when my father died I began to revisit Proust, in particular Swan's Way, Remembrance of Things Past. So this began to filter into the work because of the way in which Proust measures time by light and by space and literally by the process of remembering. All these things I think are really fascinatingly interconnected and had a very, very clear resonance in how the work came about.

JW: Could we start by talking about that place that you've evoked, of the reality and the remembered horse, the horse of your son's imagination, and then the horse in reality?

SB: Yes, absolutely. I liked the dichotomy between the imagined, the origami horse and the physicality of the real beast, the horse.

JW: So then we have a space and the scenario changes and we actually see your son sitting in a room looking quite extraordinary, Can just talk about that look which so captures a moment?

SB: In terms of the look, it was something that I had in my mind's eye as to how close I wanted that shot to be. In the shot you see the young boy's face. It's between ten and about eleven in the morning when the light is very gentle and the way that the light falls onto Enzo's face has all those qualities that take us into that world that's both real and imaginary. To move from the winged horse into that moment draws you to the real space, to the real world. And you don't immediately recognize that there is a horse there until the body of the horse comes into focus. I think the dichotomy between those two things, the imagined space and then suddenly there’s this huge beast there and you think: My God, this is real, that's quite a fantastic moment.

JW: The camera angle and shot is very interesting, because your son is sitting incredibly still. There's one point where you see the horse's bridle hanging down and you suddenly see your son's head just lift for a second and there's that lovely moment of tension where we, as viewers, realize that actually that's a real horse in front of him, and he realizes too. This is real emotion, in real time; happening, and you can't make that up.

SB: No. But I was absolutely petrified. I thought, ‘My God, you know, I have to be so calm here. This is my son and if that horse bolts we could have a fatality on our hands’. For me, the work engages with that sense of trust and that sense of total and utter fear that one has with the thing and the person that you love. But it was also about confronting fear, confronting death if you like, and confronting life actually.

JW: So can we talk a little bit about the setting and then of course we move to the next shot in your film where we actually see the living room?

SB: It was very hard. I I work with Film and Video Umbrella who are just incredible and innovative. It was hell trying to find somebody who would volunteer their living room. Eventually we found a wonderful 1930s deco building that a property developer had bought that was going to be pulled down, but it was a beautiful building. Because it was more or less derelict, we had to literally carpet it, underline the carpet, in case the horse did something. We wanted to create an authentic feel of a room that could belong to one's grandparents. It's quite a bourgeois room, kind of comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. We matched the colour scheme to the colours of the Stubbs painting that we talked about earlier.

JW: The shot where you see your son on the sofa is interesting because suddenly when we're closely looking at his face, scrutinising his gaze the horse moves across. Then you pull out and we've got the living room and your son looking so small. You finish the sequence by going back to the mobile and we're taken back into the possibility of his imagination continuing back to something more containable.

SB: Yeah, I mean, in terms of how we edited it, was to very specifically play with a sense of that time. There’s something like twenty-five to thirty frames difference between the first image on the right and the second image. Effectively they're the same image but there's a slight time delay that emphasizes the idea of double take. Returning in the final shot, to the winged horse again, they're like book ends. They announce it and then they complete the story. The final edit of the mobile is of a different length in the beginning, so we stop it before it slows down. It's that sense of the story coming to a conclusion, but not quite.

JW: Am I right in thinking that you shot this one in 16mm?

SB: Yeah it was really important to me to work on 16mm format. There were two cameras in that space and we shot at exactly the same time. In other words, the film was synchronized in that way with the same image being shot at the same time but from two different vantage points. There's something about 16mm film, which is so saturated with colour, so painterly and exquisite. I think that the essence of it being shot on a particular format gives you a wealth of experience and information that you wouldn't have got shooting even on high end digital. You get this slight sort of spangled moment that has no rational and yet, it's exactly that lack of rational which I think is so magical you know, so wonderful.

JW: I also wanted to talk about the relationship in your work between silence and sound, because in your exhibition you've got one piece which has sound and the piece we're discussing now is silent.

SB: I do use silence often in my video and always in the film work. The very simple reason is the sense of deafening through silence. Because you bring your own knowledge of sound, the sound of a horse snorting and all those kinds of things. To take sound away in this piece seemed to make it more noisy than to have it there. It also allows a space for imagination. I wanted to create something that really made you catch your breath.