Usurp Art Gallery & Studios invites you to “Chila Burman’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition” - an exuberant retrospective celebrating over 20 years of experimental and provocative art by one of the leading figures among UK Black and Asian artists. Glitter and bindis collide with print, paint, photographic and mixed media in Chila Burman’s explorations of the constructions of classed, gendered, sexualised and ‘raced’ subjectivities, personal memories, and the physicality and pleasures of visual materials.

About Chila Kumari Burman

Chila Kumari Burman was born Liverpool but now lives and works in London. She studied an Art & Design Foundation Course Southport Art College followed by Fine Art and Graphic Design degree at Leeds Polytechnic where she graduated with a 1st Class Honours. She completed a masters in Fine Art (Printmaking) at the Slade School of Fine Art. Since then she has won numerous arts awards and her paintings are held in public and private collections including an inconic 'Auto Portrait' 1996-2004 inkjet print on paper and canvas purchased by the collection of Sir Richard Branson.

"Since the mid-1980s I have been exploring the experiences and aesthetics of Asian femininity in paintings and installations, photography and printmaking, video and film. In my more recent works, this theme has taken on a new power and vibrancy. I am currently making a new body of work to draw all of these together and to develop the ideas and images contained in the new cultural contexts of national and international politics in the twenty-first century. Challenging stereotypical assumptions of Asian women, my work is informed by popular culture, Bollywood, fashion, found objects, the politics of femininity the celebration of feminity; self-portraiture exploring the production of my own sexuality and dynamism; the relationship between popular culture and high art; gender and identity politics."

"My current art practice is a progressive culmination of over twenty years of experimental work in a wide range of media including photography and photomontage, graphics and plastic arts, video, sound, installation and performance. Much of my work emerges from a tradition of graphic political satire, generated from an adversarial position within the gender and identity politics of a post-colonial, class oriented, and visually saturated contemporary Britain. By dwelling on the poetics of visual composition and arrangement - dealing with the complexities of framing, layering and assemblage - an alternative and distinctive formal relationship has emerged in my work. In a maturing of sensibilities shaped through an ongoing engagement with art practice, my current interests invite and engage viewers to experience a new dynamics and intimacy of looking." - Chila Kumari Burman

For further information visit www.chila-kumari-burman.co.uk

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