Synapse (1987–1992), by British Indian artist Sutapa Biswas, draws on photographs made during her 1986–87 return to India, staging her nude body as a surface for memories of people, monuments, and places.
The journey followed her family's displacement from Santiniketan and her childhood move to England. She returned with several hundred slides from temple sites, landscapes, people, and her early hometown, treating them as records and raw material while resisting nostalgia. Biswas described the synapse as an "undefined territory" where memory shifts between vivid passages and blind spots, and desire joins lived experience to imagined space. Her projected body brought this metaphor into questions of sexuality and the viewer's own fantasy.
Across the black-and-white works, architectural details, temple facades, sculptural reliefs, landscapes, and figures float over Biswas's torso or extend across stone-like backgrounds. At times her centrally placed, outward-looking body blocks access to the illuminated image. Elsewhere temple patterns form tattoo-like striations, exchanging the apparent textures of flesh and carved stone. Cropping and superimposition make the body alternately whole, fragmented, screenlike, and opaque. The project varies in structure: Synapse I comprises four photographs, Synapse II is a diptych, and Synapse III and Synapse IV are single large-scale works.
Biswas reworked her travel slides in several stages. In 1989 she first used them in screenprints, drawn to lithographic film because, held up to the light, it could be seen from either side like a membrane. During a 1990 residency at the Banff Centre in Alberta, she projected parts of the slide images onto a paper screen and onto her own torso in a private studio performance, then photographed her body with the images falling across it.
Synapse was first presented at OR Gallery, Vancouver, in 1991, the year Biswas issued a Canadian artist's book in an edition of 20. Solo presentations followed at The Photographers' Gallery, London, in 1992, and Leeds City Art Gallery and OBORO, Montreal, in 1993, accompanied by a London-Leeds catalogue. The series was nominated for the Deutsche Bank European Photography Award in 1992. Works later appeared in the Sixth Havana Biennial in 1997 and entered the University of Leeds and Rochdale Art Gallery collections. Tate Britain displayed Synapse II, Synapse III, and Synapse IV together in The 80s: Photographing Britain in 2024–25.
