Chila Kumari Singh Burman, a self-described Punjabi-Liverpudlian Pop artist and 'alien', is a major figure of the British Black arts movement that emerged in the 1980s. She is one of the few artists to have been chosen to decorate the prestigious portico of the Tate Britain for the 2020 Tate Winter Commission.
Read MoreBorn in Bootle, a town near Liverpool, Burman's parents were immigrants from Punjab, India, who sold ice cream from a van at Formby Beach. Various ice cream-related motifs notably emerge from Burman's artworks. Burman's many childhood visits to see the Blackpool Illuminations lights festival were also influential, traces of which can be found in her later neon installations.
To avoid arranged marriage, in 1975 Burman went to art school. Graduating with a degree in printmaking at Leeds Polytechnic in 1979, Burman became more politically active over the course of her MA in Fine Art at London's Slade School of Fine Art. As well as joining the feminist punk band Delta 5 after graduation, Burman worked on the Asian feminist magazine Mukti.
Burman became a significant figure in the British Black arts movement in the 1980s, alongside other Black and Asian women artists like Lubaina Himid, Sonia Boyce, Ingrid Pollard, Sutapa Biswas, Marlene Smith, and Brenda Agard. Burman featured in hallmark exhibitions including The Thin Black Line (1985), curated by Himid, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
Chila Kumari Burman's art explores and celebrates Asian femininity. Spanning painting, printmaking, installation, photography, and film making, Bur man's artworks are informed by popular culture, fashion, personal experience, and the politics of gender and identity.
Burman's cultural background and upbringing played into her seminal works, emerging in the 1990s and 2000s. Into her colourful mixed-media works, the artist incorporates a collage of everyday imagery and materials.
In her 'Ice C ream' series of the early 2000s, the artist made collages incorporating images of her father's ice cream van. Burman also made colourful collaged prints using imagery of ice cream cones, ice lolly wrappers, and advertisements along with Bollywood posters. Burman has also produced sculptural works like Cornets and Screwballs go Vegas (2010), decorating upturned ice cream cones with glitter and sequins to appear like magical castles.
Alongside this nostalgic pop imagery, in works like the highly sexualised 'Bindi Girls' series, first appearing in 2009, the artist began working with colourful Bindis, shiny sequins, glitter, body stickers, and other retro jewellery.
Since the 1990s, Burman has produced self-portraits in print, paint, and collage to explore her own conception of identity and how others present their identity. These works, titled 'Auto-Portraits', incorporate a series of hand-painted photographs of the artist in various guises from Indian and Western pop culture.
In TALL FLY GIRL! Auto-Portrait (Fly Girl Series) (1993), the artist presents a grid-like composition of thousands of these images digitally altered in a photocopier. A later inkjet- on- paper print, Auto-Portrait (1996–2012), presents a colourful self-portrait imprinted with 28 of these smaller colourful portraits.
Burman's short films and video works expand her artworks into moving images complete with musical accompaniment. In the early video triptych Dreaded Comparison (1995), harmonious visions of natural and human diversity regress into a visual and text-based narrative of hatred and violence. Kamla, made the following year, is about the artist's mother.
Other films include the psychedelic ice cream- themed Candy Pop and Juicy Lucy (2006) and Dada and The Punjabi Princess (2017), which earned Burman an Arts Council award. During the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020, Burman made Armour in collaboration with video artist Susanne Dietz.
Burman has been producing art for public spaces since the mid-1980s, when she collaborated with fellow British artist Keith Piper on the anti-racist Southall Black Resistance Mural (1985). Since then, Burman has worked on a variety of public projects.
Winning the 2020 Tate Winter Commission, Burman's Remembering a Brave New World saw the Tate Britain's entrance adorned with light sculptures representing Hindu deities, animals, ice creams, and references to colonial history. In the following year, Burman's Covent Garden installation lit up the historic Market Building with vibrant neon imagery.
On top of various scholarships and residencies, Burman received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts London in 2018 and in 2020 was elected to London's Art Workers' Guild. Burman is also one of the first British Asian female artists to be the subject of a published monograph, Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures (1995), written by Lynda Nead. Two BBC documentaries have explored the artist's work.
Chila Kumari Burman has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include Tales of Valiant Queens, Middlesbrough Institute of Art (2018); Beyond Pop, Wolverhampton Art Gallery (2017); ICE CREAM and BINDI GIRLS, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London (2013); Fragments of my Imagination, Paradox Gallery, Singapore (2011); CANDY-POP & JUICY LUCY, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, London (2006); Material Serendipity, Plymouth Arts Centre (2004); Points of View, Hastings Museum & Art Gallery (2003); 28 Positions in 34 Years, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1999); Ice Cream and Magic, The Pump House, People's History Museum, Manchester (1997); Between the Visible and Invisible, National College of the Arts Lahore, Pakistan (1996); 28 Positions in 34 Years, Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool (1995).
Group exhibitions include The Place is Here, South London Gallery (2017); The 1980s : Today's Beginnings?, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (2016); Struggle(s), Maison Particuliere, Brussels (2012); Seeing In Colour British Council Touring Show, Centre for Urban History, Lviv, Ukraine (2010); British Subjects, Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2009); RCA Secret Royal College of Art, London (2001); A Grand Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2000); Out of India, Queens Museum, New York (1998); With Your Own Face On It, Plymouth Arts Centre (1994); The Thin Black Line, Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (1985); Black Women Time Now, Battersea Arts Centre, London (1983).
Burman's website can be found here, and her Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022