What I am Reading Now…
Sutapa Biswas
December 2024

A Library of Maps: 

There is a collection of books that I keep by my bedside on the wooden floor. Somehow the knowledge that they are simply there inhabiting my mind’s eye whilst I am in a deep state of sleep is a source of great comfort to me. For what is contained within and between them, like secrets whispered to me, become my mantra for the day ahead. They exist as a ballet of worlds and as ballast in driving rain. They live as the warmth of sunshine against my forehead when I most need it. It is in the company of voices found through the act of reading, that I discover myself.  

A book that I return to often is the late Guy Brett’s The Crossing of Innumerable Paths: Essays on Art. Guy (1942-2021) was a dear friend of mine for over thirty-five years, and though now departed his writings continue to offer guidance and wisdom. In this book, he writes, ‘You probably wonder what this book is about. But there is no reason to explain things. You don’t need to have an answer. I think of the artist Len Lye and his ‘feeling days’, an idea he had as a youth. For instance, ‘If you’ve just heard someone clanking a nice piece of metal outside your window, then that’s a sound day’, what Lye would call ‘the sound aspect of things’. Then there were taste days, anything you care to choose and concentrate on. My intention is not just for you to see but to feel your way around this book.’ This concept in essence is how I have come to navigate myself through life – not purely by the act of seeing, but by feeling my way through it.   

I am reminded too in this process of reading or writing or making art, of the importance of what the film director and author Mrinal Sen articulates, ‘I have told stories of my life, also of my times, not the whole of my life and times, and hardly anything chronologically. But all the time, I was intent on writing my stories ‘simply in the simplest words’.’  

Books, Boats and Birds: 

It was Guy Brett who in 2004 during our conversation about my film Birdsong, 2004, shared that he felt my spirit animal “like the title of my film, was a bird”.  His words registered because Birdsong, featuring my son and a horse situated in a living room entirely dressed with period furnishings to resemble that of an old uncle’s ‘colonial-style’ quarters, centres on my son’s first ‘joined-up’ spoken sentence in which he expressed his desire to have “a horse living with us in our living room”. My film is a silent work, its title alluding to that which we imagine we hear when making, for example, a wish. In this, led by feeling, for me it functions like a love song.   

It is in my search for wisdom that may ground me, that I also turn to the writings of the painter and poet Etel Adnan. In her book The Beauty of Light – a compilation of interviews between Etel Adnan and Laure Adler – Adnan reminds us of the importance of ‘the remembrance of a life of impressions.’ She asserts, ‘It’s a cumulative experience, it’s not a precise place. Even when I mention the mountain, this mountain had infinite points of view; you went around it, you climbed it. It comes back to me most often the way I saw it from my windows. I can draw it with my eyes closed, I saw it so many times. But I was closer to the mountain than [the artist] Cezanne was. Cezanne went to see it, whereas I had it in my bay window. I couldn’t see anything else. My paintings are compositions that reflect, that visually translate diverse experiences. I can’t tell you it’s this or that place. It’s a collage of these places.’ 

Existing by profession in an artworld that tells me that I am this or that, all I can do is reconcile myself in the knowledge that I am an artist, and one of art’s monsters. Cast, and monstered by a system, from this vantage point – if indeed one can call it that – I can give myself grace to break all the rules. Grace to claim that space which allows me to define all my own geographies and the gravity to state for myself, where I can and do belong. I live in the knowledge that the etymology of my name ‘Sutapa’ is a verb. Through my art, my reading, my writing and my making, I know that I too am citizen of the universe.  

My recommendation:

Here is a list of books and films that I am currently reading, have read and am re-reading. Not all of them are included in the photograph here. But all are beautiful books. I do not wish to present a summary of each, but rather to propose them for you to consider reading. For me they exist as being part of a ‘library of maps’ which, once upon a time a dear friend of mine, the art historian Moira Roth (1933-2021), and I exchanged stories of long into the summer. 

In honour of those we love – those who held us – but who do not always define us:

A brief note however, about a particular book by Jhumpa Lahiri: The Lowland. One of my favourite books because though a work of fiction, it holds details of a history, time, and place that belongs to the era and lives of my mother and father. For this I am truly grateful to Lahiri.  

Read. Make art. Live life through feeling. Be happy. Be well.