Chila Kumari Singh Burman, Neon dreams

The Holburne Museum is proud to unveil a new display of recent work, Neon Dreams, by Chila Kumari Singh Burman. Known for her sculptures and large-scale installation art employing light, Burman’s vibrant neon sculptures depict colourful images drawn from popular media, history, Hindu-Punjabi festival culture and mythology. Burman’s installation at the Holburne Museum will illuminate the neo-classical spaces of the building’s front facade and Ballroom Gallery, presenting iconic symbols rich in personal and cultural histories.

The artist’s distinctive visual identity is shaped by her own cultural heritage and experiences growing up in a Punjabi Hindu family on Merseyside. Working across printmaking, drawing, painting, installation, and film, Burman’s wider practice is devoted to challenging stereotypes, and placing alternative perspectives of Britishness at the forefront of art history.

The artist’s installation at the Holburne will include The Glowing Canopies (2023), Burman’s largest individual neon work to date, installed on the building’s facade, offering a new perspective down Bath’s magnificent Great Pulteney Street. Seeking to illustrate the close relationship between trees and bees, and its growing precarity as a result of climate change, Burman’s vibrant work assembles delicate neon replicas of both species into an spectacular explosion of colour.

Taking centre stage in the museum’s Ballroom is a life-size, three-dimensional neon Tiger sculpture. Measuring three metres in length, My Tiger Janu (2022) references childhood memories of the artist’s father’s 1960s ice cream van, which was crowned with an elaborate Bengal tiger figurine. A common motif in Burman’s work, the tiger is as much playful as it is a link to her cultural roots, and a symbol for survival and strength in the context of the broader economic, political, and social history of migration from India to Britain.

Neon Dreams precedes the opening of a new solo exhibition of new and recent neon and sculptural works by Burman at Compton Verney, from 26 October 2024 – Sunday 26 January 2025.