Went to a talk by artist, Supata Biswas. I had been working earlier in the day and explained to some people who she was and what kind of work she did before she made the one currently on display at Tate Modern.
I remembered an image that I called iconic - it was everywhere in the mid-late 1980s and described it as I remembered it. I described it buy saying it was like a Hindu many-armed god, trying hard to remember the name of one such God. When she came to describe the work in her talk, she made no reference to Gods, just that the arms refered to other things like Artemisia Gentillechi's work (sp?).
I realised how much I read that work through her ethnicity and what I assume to be her religion. I also read the work at Tate Modern through her ethnicity. It's funny because I am absolutely aware of the preponderance by white critics and historians, etc to read all artwork by non-white artists as always being about their minority identity or about ethnicity. And that this is a really big issue and problem because it reduces all artwork by non-white artists simply to their difference from 'us', making it only about one thing and nothing else. And yet I was doing that same thing to Biswas. Maybe because of the time when her work first came to prominence - when Black Arts (and Feminism) was a strong 'movement' - I don't know. Goes to show though, just how much I can fall into the same reductive, simplistic traps as anyone else out there...