Artist Chila Burman delivers lecture as Visiting Professor in Art History at The University of Manchester
On 30 April internationally acclaimed artist and 2024/25 Pilkington Visiting Professor in Art History, Chila Kumari Burman came to the University to give a public lecture and lead students through her landmark Imperial War Museum North exhibition.
On Wednesday, 30 April internationally acclaimed artist, Chila Kumari Burman came to the University in her capacity as the 2024-2025 Pilkington Visiting Professor in Art History.
In an illuminating keynote public lecture, Burman discussed her new commission Chila Welcomes You currently on display at Imperial War Museum North, Salford. Burman鈥檚 work for the IWMN addresses themes of South Asian migration to Britain, working-class entrepreneurialism and the importance of having access to diverse visual cultures.
Burman鈥檚 lecture was expertly led by Iris Veysey, Senior Curator, IWM 14-18 NOW Legacy Fund, and Burman talked to an enthralled audience about her recent adoption of neon-lights as artistic medium, alongside earlier important print and collage work from the 1980s and 1990s.
Burman and her work came to prominence in the 1980s, and she is a central figure in what has become known as the Black British Art Movement. Born and raised in Liverpool, early in her career, Burman used her artistic practice as a form of social activism, and etchings and photo-lithographs made as a student at Leeds Polytechnic addressed such issues the Northern Irish hunger strikes; anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa; Anti-Nuclear protest; and the riots of 1981- in Brixton, Toxteth and elsewhere.
For Burman, the process of art making was, in her words, a way of trying to 鈥渦nderstand what is going on in the world鈥� and her position in relation to contemporary events.
Today, Burman is perhaps best known for her remarkable Tate Britain Winter Commission, Remembering a Brave New World, 2020, which was a unabashed and uncompromising celebration of British-Asian culture in a hyper-vibrant array of glowing neons and wallpapers. Throughout her career, Burman has harnessed the various techniques of assemblage and her new work at IWMN includes an installation of found and assembled everyday objects; a large-scale neon homage to her mother鈥檚 clothes shop, and her first work in tapestry.
The Pilkington chair in Art History is among the oldest chairs in Art History in the country. It was founded in 1956 by sisters Margaret (1891) and Dorthy (1890) Pilkington, who were born in the 1890s in Pendleton, Lancashire to the wealthy Pilkington family, owners of Pilkington Glassworks and the Pilkington Tile Company. Margaret in particular was attracted to the visual arts at a young age and studied wood engraving at the Slade, where she was a pupil of Lucien Pissarro. It is particularly appropriate then that Burman, who also studied printmaking at the Slade, is this year鈥檚 Pilkington Visiting Professor.
Following her keynote lecture, on Thursday 1 May, Burman also gave a talk for MA students on the Curating Art module, addressing her experiences as a DIY artist-curator and the pitfalls and pleasures of working with curators at major institutions. It was a lively discussion!
Later that day, Chila also led a tour of her fascinating and exuberant exhibition at the IWMN to both undergraduate Art History and post-graduate students from across AHCP programmes; another inspirational event - watch out for a student review of the visit in