Chila Kumari Burman
| Chila Kumari Burman | |
|---|---|
| Born | Bootle, Liverpool, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Southport College of Art; Leeds Polytechnic; Slade School of Fine Art |
| Known for | Prints, painting, installation |
| Website | www.chila-kumari-burman.co.uk |
Chila Kumari Burman is a British artist. Her work explores not only her immediate family but the problematic representations of South Asian women and their histories in the UK, through the lens of self-representation and identity politics. She was born in Liverpool and attended the Southport College of Art, the Leeds Polytechnic and Slade School of Fine Art, where she graduated in 1982. She works in printmaking, painting, installation and film, and was part of the Black British Art movement of the 1980s. She draws on fine and pop art imagery in works that explore Asian femininity and her personal family history, merging Bollywood bling with childhood memories. Burman was one of the first British Asian female artists to have a monograph written about her work: Lynda Nead’s Chila Kumari Burman: Beyond Two Cultures (1995), and a second monograph by Nead was published in 2012.
She was born in Bootle, near Liverpool. Her parents were Punjabi Hindus and they moved to the UK in the 1950s. This fact of biography has provided Burman with the means to critically examine the situation of South Asian women through herself, her family, her parents and her grandparents, as a second-generation artist of Pakistani origins in the UK. Her works – particularly her prints from the 1980s – were shown with other Black British artists and part of their political protest in the 1980s and 1990s against the police, against racism in British society and particularly stereotypes of South Asian women.
In the 1980s her work was shown in many black British artists shows from: Four Indian Women Artists (UK Artists Gallery, 1982); to Black Women Time Now (Battersea Arts Centre, London, 1983); The Thin Black Line (ICA, London, 1985); Black Art: New Directions (Stoke on Trent Museum and Art Gallery, 1989); and the feminist exhibition Along the Lines of Resistance (Rochdale Art Gallery and touring, 1989).
In the 1990s and 2000s her work has explored her family history and her father’s work as an ice-cream seller in Bootle (in her exhibitions Candy-Pop & Juicy Lucy, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, University of Greenwich, London, 2006; Ice Cream and Magic, The Pump House, People’s History Museum, Manchester, 1997). In the 1990s, her work began to be shown internationally and she was in the Fifth Havana Biennale (1994); in Transforming the Crown (Studio Museum, Harlem and Bronx Museum, New York, 1997); Genders and Nations (with Shirin Neshat; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, New York State, 1998). Her retrospective touring show, 28 Positions in 34 Years, went to Camerawork, London; Liverpool Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; Oldham Art Gallery; Huddersfield Art Gallery; Street Level Gallery, Glasgow; Cardiff Technical College, Cardiff; Watermans Arts Centre, London. In the 2000s, she has increasingly shown between UK and the Asian sub-continent, taking part in key feminist and South Asian women artists’ exhibitions that explore the diaspora of South Asian identities: e.g. South Asian Women of the Diaspora (Queens Library, New York, 2001) and Text and Subtext (Earl-Lu Gallery, Lasalle-SIA University, Singapore, 2000) toured to Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney, Australia, in 2000 and Ostiasiataka Museet (Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities) Stockholm, in 2001, Sternersenmuseet, Oslo, Norway, and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan; X-ray Art Centre (Rui Wen Hua Yi Shu Zhong Xin), Beijing, China, in 2002 (exhibition catalogue).
...
Wikipedia