Chila Kumari Singh Burman's multidisciplinary practice explores femininity, identity and popular culture. Her illuminated installations use autobiographical and South Asian imagery to engage the architecture and histories of public sites.
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What the project record tells us
Tate Britain façade commission, 2020
A façade can carry a site's contested history
For Tate Britain's 2020 winter commission, remembering a brave new world, Burman combined lights and vinyl with images drawn from Hindu mythology, Bollywood and personal memory. The artist's account explains that Britannia became Kali and that the installation included the anti-colonial figure Lakshmibai. The building's existing symbolism therefore became part of the artwork's subject. A comparable façade brief should begin with the site's iconography and interpretation, then develop attachment and lighting plans that support the artist's specific transformation of that setting.
Which existing architectural symbols should the commission engage, and how will that reading be explained?
Big Art Partners planning prompt
South Hall, Covent Garden Market Building, 2021
Suspension and entrances organize a shared interior
Do you see words in rainbows? occupied Covent Garden's South Hall in 2021. Burman's studio account describes a neon phrase at the entrance, an octagonal form suspended at the hall's centre, and animal sculptures, words and collage distributed through the space. This arrangement offers a useful precedent for a commission within an active market building: the entrance establishes the encounter, while suspended and dispersed elements extend it through the interior. Planning should reconcile viewing positions, overhead installation and the building's everyday circulation.
How would entrance signage, suspended elements and ordinary market circulation work together?
Big Art Partners planning prompt
Royal Pavilion exterior commission, Brighton, 2023
New imagery grows from the host's history
The Shining Lights of Service addressed the Royal Pavilion's use as a hospital for wounded Indian soldiers during the First World War. Burman's 2023 installation incorporated neon imagery connected to the Pavilion's interiors, including a phoenix and Ayurvedic medical tools, alongside a reworked dragon. The artist describes the work as an homage to the soldiers. For a heritage commission, this is a specific precedent for researching collections and site history before choosing imagery, with interpretive work accompanying the technical development of an exterior installation.
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Chila Kumari Singh Burman is based in Hackney, London, United Kingdom. Documented disciplines include installation, printmaking, painting, film, neon sculpture.
