Chila Burman

Chila Kumari Singh Burman was born in Liverpool in 1957, a few years after her parents migrated to England in 1954 for employment opportunities. Her father owned a business in tailoring but became an ice-cream van vendor when this failed. Burman has cited her parents as influences on her work; the vibrancy of the family home with its colourful Indian Hindu decor and culture made its way into her art, which she has been producing since the 1980s. Her work is also informed by her own identity as a woman of South Asian descent from British working-class roots. The history of her family often finds its way into her pieces as well, as a means to express broader trends of the diasporic experience for South Asian communities worldwide. She has been described as a major contributor to the British Black Arts Movement, drawing from both the feminist movements and the emerging counterculture of Black British people in the UK to interrogate what ‘Britishness’ means. She has a Bachelor of Arts degree from Leeds Polytechnic and a Master of Arts from Slade School of Fine Art, as well as an honorary doctorate awarded in 2017 from the University of Arts, London. Beyond her career as an artist, she is committed to arts education and has taught at the Lahore College of Art.

Her art ranges from small prints to outside public installations, and she merges high art styles with aspects of popular culture, including everything from Bollywood to punk rock. Aside from the emphasis on her family background and the lens this provides on the politics and experiences of migration and diaspora, the strength of her portfolio rests on her explorations of South Asian womanhood and sexuality. Her self-portraits, in particular, engage with ideas of constructing the self, reinvention and the complexity of being a woman of colour. Interestingly, she uses imagery and characters from Indian mythology and history to think about, and confront, representations of South Asian women today.

Burman’s positionality and work as an artist has also been deeply shaped by her activism. According to Burman, her activist spirit was cultivated at an early age by the community action of her parents and their generosity towards people who were struggling. Her early involvement with groups and charities in Leeds, such as the Organization for Women of Asian and African Descent as well as a women’s refuge for Asian women in the city, made her passionate about representing ethnic minority groups in the UK. Her artistic method itself, of utilizing paper, ‘found objects’ (materials kept, found or collected) and printmaking, acts as a means for Burman to highlight the importance of accessibility in art. She is also a trustee for the London-based charity Rich Mix, which facilitates people from different backgrounds coming together to access art. The two scholarly monographs written about Burman in 1995 and 2012 are testament to her influence in the history of Black British culture. She was awarded an MBE in 2022 and she continues to work in her studio in Hackney, east London.