Sim Smith is delighted to present Heft, an exciting two-person exhibition bringing together Indian-American artist Melissa Joseph and British-Indian artist Sutapa Biswas. In a dialogue around themes of belonging, memory, and displacement, the exhibition reflects how spaces embed histories and memories, while reimagining identity through the evolving notion of home.
Joseph unveils her first large-scale body of work in the UK for this exhibition, created in response to her research following sheep across Scotland. Drawing on her Indian-American upbringing, Joseph illustrates a resonant parallel between animal instinct and human migration, beginning with how ewes pass down vital spatial knowledge to their lambs, an inherited understanding of where to gather, move, and remain without the need for fences. When disease or loss interrupts this lineage, that knowledge fractures, leaving the flock disoriented.
On view alongside Joseph's work, Lumen (2021) is a major film by Biswas co-commissioned by FVU (UK), Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Kettle’s Yard, BALTIC with additional support by Autograph and Arts Council England. The film is a fictional work tracing a lyrical journey from birth to departure, poised on the threshold of an unknown voyage. In part inspired by Biswas’ own matrilineal family history, from pre-partition India to her family’s subsequent migration by sea from Mumbai to Dover in the mid-1960s, this work gives voice to intergenerational memory through sight and sound, weaving together personal reflection with broader histories of movement and displacement.
Together, Joseph and Biswas trace constellations of past, present, and future, where identity and memory flickers, fragments, and is carefully gathered again. In this shared exhibition space, the works move like tides, mapping unseen routes through which stories shift and breathe, where belonging is felt rather than fixed in place.
