Neon, bling and a new Kali on Tate Britain’s facade

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 8 min

Over the winter of 2020 and 2021, Chila Kumari Singh Burman covered the whole neoclassical front of Tate Britain in vinyl, neon and bling, replacing the pediment’s Britannia with a luminous Kali. The work folded Hindu mythology, Bollywood colour and the artist’s own Liverpool childhood into a single facade, and became the first edition of what Tate now calls its Winter Commission. It is also, on closer reading, a piece with a genuine biographical link to the building it lit up.

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Tate Britain’s facade is a piece of 1897 neoclassicism: a portico of Corinthian columns under a stone pediment, designed by Sidney R. J. Smith and built with money from the sugar refiner Henry Tate. For three months from December 2020, that facade disappeared under something else entirely. Chila Kumari Singh Burman wrapped the columns, the portico and the pediment in die-cut vinyl and free-standing neon, in the hot pinks, golds and blues of a funfair sign rather than a public gallery. Ice cream cones and lollies glowed above the entrance. Deities stood among them. And at the very top, in the spot where the sculpted figure of Britannia has watched over Millbank since the building opened, Burman put a neon Kali.

That single swap is the design argument the whole commission is built on. Britannia is the allegorical figure of British national and imperial identity: armoured, seated, holding a trident. Kali is a principal goddess in Hindu tradition, associated with time, transformation and the destruction of what no longer serves, and widely read as a goddess of liberation and power. Burman did not add Kali alongside Britannia. She put her in Britannia’s place, on Britannia’s own building, for anyone walking along the Thames to see for free, at any hour, for the whole run. Remembering a Brave New World is a title that describes exactly what the artist did to that pediment.

A Liverpool eye trained in printmaking

Burman was born in Liverpool in 1957, to a Punjabi Hindu family; her father ran an ice cream van business in the city, and the sweets, lollies and van signage of that trade recur across her work, this facade included. She trained first at Leeds Polytechnic and then completed her MA in Fine Art Printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, a printmaking grounding that shows in the flat, layered colour of her later light works: each neon or vinyl element behaves like a printed plate, built up in registered layers rather than blended.

She came up through the British Black Arts Movement of the 1980s, and was one of the artists included in The Thin Black Line, Lubaina Himid’s landmark 1985 exhibition at the ICA in London, alongside Sutapa Biswas, Claudette Johnson and Himid herself. That show argued, at a moment when British institutions rarely gave the argument space, that Black and Asian women artists were central to British art rather than peripheral to it. Tate’s own collection now holds Burman’s work, and the Winter Commission put that same practice, forty years on from the ICA, across the front of one of the institutions the 1980s movement was arguing with. That trajectory, from a co-curated group show at a small London gallery to a solo commission covering a national collection’s own building, is the kind of arc a listings notice rarely has room to draw, and it is what makes this commission more than a seasonal light show.

Between those two points, Burman’s practice widened well beyond printmaking. Drawing, sculpture, film and collage all sit in her body of work, alongside a recurring interest in autobiography, gender and the visual language of South Asian diasporic life in Britain: ice lollies, bindis, tigers, Hindi film posters, family photographs and the branded signage of small businesses like her father’s van. Neon became a consistent medium across that practice well before Tate approached her, which is part of why the commission reads as a culmination rather than a departure. A national gallery’s facade gave her, for the first time, a surface built at the scale her imagery had always seemed to want.

From Blackpool’s promenade to Millbank

Burman has spoken about two sources for the facade’s visual language, and both are personal rather than art-historical. The first is the Blackpool Illuminations, the mile of coloured lights strung along the Lancashire seafront every autumn, which she visited as a child. The second is her family’s own ice cream van, painted and lit in exactly the kind of bright, high-contrast signage that vans use to catch a customer’s eye from across a car park. Both are working-class, seaside, and entirely outside the vocabulary a stone-fronted London gallery normally uses.

Burman ran that vocabulary straight across the front of Tate Britain. Neon ice lollies and cones sat in the spaces between the columns. Vinyl patterns wrapped the columns themselves. Bindis, lotus flowers and jewelled ornament, the “bling” Burman has named as a deliberate material category in her own practice, studded the composition at a scale built for a building rather than a gallery wall. The effect reads, deliberately, as closer to a Diwali display or a Bollywood cinema hoarding than to a museum’s usual restraint, and that collision of registers, fairground and temple and shopfront, on a listed neoclassical facade, is the visual argument as much as the Kali figure at the top of it.

The two materials do different jobs. Vinyl is flat, applied directly to the stone, and carries the pattern work: the repeating florals, the outlines of figures, the fields of colour that read from a distance the way a printed textile does. Neon sits proud of the surface and carries the light itself, so that after dark the flat vinyl patterns recede and the illuminated outlines take over, the same shift a fairground makes at dusk when the paintwork stops mattering and the bulbs do. Building the piece from both meant it worked as a daytime composition and a night-time one without needing two separate designs, which is a practical answer to a genuine design problem: how to make one artwork perform for a London winter’s short daylight hours and its long dark ones equally well.

Kali, Lakshmibai and the figures around them

Two figures in the commission carry named historical and religious weight. Kali took Britannia’s place on the pediment, reworking a symbol of imperial Britain into a goddess of liberation and power drawn from the artist’s own religious heritage. Lower on the facade stood a second figure: Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi, a nineteenth-century queen who led armed resistance against East India Company rule during the 1857 uprising and remains one of the most widely commemorated women in the history of Indian resistance to colonial rule. Placing her alongside Kali gives the facade a second, more specific register: not only a goddess of transformation in the abstract, but a named woman who fought a particular colonial power on the ground.

Around those two figures, Burman filled the facade with a wider cast drawn from Hindu iconography and Bollywood colour, deities and ornament rendered in the same neon and vinyl vocabulary as the ice cream signage below them, so that myth, resistance and personal memory sit on the same surface rather than in separate registers. It is a facade built from accumulation rather than a single motif, in keeping with the maximalist, layered style that runs through Burman’s printmaking back to the 1980s.

Kali’s own iconography carries a specific meaning worth stating plainly, since it is easy to read the figure only as “a goddess” without the detail that makes the choice pointed. Kali is typically depicted dark-skinned, multi-armed, with her tongue out and a garland around her neck, standing over or on the god Shiva: an image built around the destruction of illusion and ego rather than the preservation of order, which is precisely the opposite function to an allegorical Britannia, whose whole purpose on a nineteenth-century public building is to preserve and represent a settled national order. Putting one where the other stood is not a swap between two similar figures. It is a swap between two figures built to do opposite work.

A commission built for a closed winter

Tate launched the Winter Commission as a response to the specific conditions of that winter. Galleries across the country were operating under reduced hours and repeated closures through the Covid-19 pandemic, and a facade commission has one advantage a gallery show does not: it can be seen from the pavement, free, at any hour, by anyone walking past, whether or not the building behind it is open. Burman’s piece was conceived from the outset as the inaugural edition of that series, and its run was extended past its original January close date to 28 February 2021 for the same reason the format existed in the first place: it was one of the few pieces of art in London that remained visible throughout a winter when so much else was shut.

That circumstance shaped the design brief as much as any curatorial theme did. A facade commission has to work as public realm design, not only as artwork: it has to read from across the river, hold up under streetlight and headlight glare rather than gallery lighting, and survive months of weather rather than the few hours of a private view. Burman’s choice of vinyl and neon, materials built for exactly that kind of exposure and already central to her own practice, meant the commission could be genuinely durable rather than a temporary projection switched off at closing time. It is a piece of public design as much as a piece of public art, built to hold a facade for a season rather than an evening.

Final thoughts

The detail worth sitting with is Millbank itself. Tate Britain’s 1897 building was funded by Henry Tate, a sugar refiner who built his business in Liverpool before expanding it to London. Burman is also from Liverpool, the daughter of a family running an ice cream van in the same city, more than half a century later and in an entirely different trade. Neither fact appears in the commission’s own framing, and neither needs to: it is simply true that the artist who covered this particular building in the light of a seaside promenade and a family van, and who put a Hindu goddess of liberation where an allegory of empire had stood since 1897, shares a home city with the man whose fortune built it. Burman turned Tate Britain’s facade into a document of her own biography for one winter. It turns out the building already had one running through it too.