Walking into Chila Burman’s I Love You Southport exhibition at The Atkinson is a visually dazzling experience that evokes many childhood memories for me. Spanning four decades, this display demonstrates the broad skill set and varied career of a pioneering artist. Trademark vibrant neon light installations are punctuated by bright ice cream paraphernalia, vivid mixed-media collages and psychedelic patterned prints. While looking around I imagine the taste of a cornet, creaminess clashing with the zing of sauce and sherbet, a sing-song ice-cream van jingle, blasts of salty sea air and damp sand under my feet. This is visual stimuli capable of transporting a person back in time. In my case it is Southport in the 1990s, a time of innocence as I accompanied my grandparents on school holiday trips to Lord Street. Burman’s works are recollections of youth that loudly invite viewers to participate in remembering as a community. Some of the motifs presented in this space are also apparent when walking around the streets of Southport today. This is a town where so much has changed and yet so little. Last year’s terrible murders and resulting riots affected this town deeply. Exhibitions like Burman’s position the stories and cultures of minoritised peoples as integral to our national identity and highlight the polyvocal reality of the British narrative. I Love You Southport is a bold love letter to family life growing up in Sefton, Merseyside between the 1950s and 1970s that evokes both a very personal and widely recognisable history of the area.
Burman’s father, Bachan Singh Burman was a tailor and magician who moved from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Bootle in 1954 in the search of a better life for his growing family. His wife, Kamala Devi, followed shortly after with their first two children. Chila and her two other siblings were born in Bootle. For many people arriving to start a new life in post-war Britain, manual labour was their only option for work, rendering their previous professions all but useless. This was a common occurrence amongst migrants and affected non-white communities severely. Legacies of imperialism and colonialism were never far from view as rising racial tensions in 1950s Britain created a palpably hostile atmosphere. During the late 1960s, Burman senior organised a visit from someone Chila describes in her warm scouse accent as a ‘dead posh’ National Trust man. In exchange for £500 and a bottle of whisky, this man helped the family secure a pitch for their ice cream van on the Freshfield beach, Southport. The Burman’s fantastic candy pink and blue ice cream van The Rocket can be seen in a photograph of The Smile You Send Returns To You (2024). This sculpture was recently created as one of seven competition entries nominated for the Fourth Plinth commission. Sadly it was not selected, however, it is clear to see why it was a crowd favourite with fantastical features such as a pink Bengal tiger leaping across the roof, glittering diamante trims and propulsive space rocket engines that spurt out tangled masses of neon tubing. All the childlike wonder she must have felt at the time poured into one object.
Being in Burman’s company one learns quickly of her history which she shares with generous openness. Recalling happy memories helping her father after he was done selling ice creams for the day, she tells of evenings cleaning his van from top to bottom after a long shift. After scrubbing away at the goopy mess of Mr Whippy ice cream and raspberry sauce from the floor, she was rewarded for a job well done by eating any remaining chocolate flake dust from the bottom of empty tubs. Burman’s achilles heel was a choc ice because the purple patterned wrapper reminded her of the luxurious packaging on Turkish delight. Bold patterns and bright colours were all around Burman during this time and this is reflected across the entire exhibition. Evidenced most acutely in the playful Spoon Painting (2024), a white canvas is bejewelled with plastic spoons transformed from found objects into a mesmerisingly gaudy mixed-media sculptural collage. An abundance of saturated hues were present in advertising and imagery as Burman was growing up. On Sundays, she would go to the Hindu temple to watch a Bollywood movie which would be awash with culturally significant colours. In Hinduism, brightly coloured adornments are considered part of divine expression with celebrations such as Holi including the throwing of bright gulal powder as a celebration of good triumphing over evil. The use of distinctively coloured flowers and textiles are also a general part of daily life in Indian culture. Looking at Burman’s work, it is evident that these intoxicating visuals had a profound effect on her as a youngster. As an avid collector, she often includes embellishments in her works bought on her travels or in charity shops. Like a magpie, Burman chooses little nicknacks and presents them for her viewers as surprise visual gifts. Flyers, posters and printed pictures of toys all add to the feeling that I am looking at a visual diary of Burman’s childhood memories.
In a mixed-media print Cornets and Screwballs (2023) Burman has stacked glass representations of these ice cream wafers and containers on top of one another in towers. Immediately recognisable to anyone walking past the counter of a Southport ice cream vendor, these tottering, waffled pillars crowd and in places taper over the picture frame in uniform groupings. There are examples of these works in a vitrine pleasingly presented in dark blue and clear glass. These were created during her residency at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland. Here she worked with minority women-led arts project Sagini whose purpose is to encourage an end to gender based violence in their communities. Glassmaking is an ancient industry that originated in Asia and Egypt centuries before it came to England in the later part of the Roman period. It was also male-dominated and so I imagine the supportive environment here with this group of women forming and blowing glass objects together. The vulnerability of the material and their stories as they counsel each other whilst making is juxtaposed with their strength of will and perseverance in reclaiming a practice denied to them through racist and patriarchal systems. The ice cream cone is a visual cue that links this work to fond memories of a youth spent in Southport. Whilst Burman speaks of her time here, she becomes emotional. She says it is due to the fact that she used to come to The Atkinson all the time while at Southport College to look at paintings and never once thought she would show her work here, never mind have a solo exhibition. To Burman, I Love You Southport brings her practice full circle and it is a privilege to see such a prolific artist in British art history have their hometown moment in such a way.
As a key member of the Black British Art movement, Burman has consistently challenged stereotypes and fixed notions of British identity in her work. She has often described herself as a ‘Majajani’, a Punjabi term for a hedonistic woman. This desire for experiencing life’s pleasures to the fullest is evident whilst listening to her speak about times in her early career when she lived and worked experimentally with other artists. Her name is most often seen alongside women such as Lubaina Himid, Sutapa Biswas, Claudette Johnson and Maud Sulter, a grouping that could be considered a former vanguard in feminist art. Work from this era, such as her directly sexual Body Print series from the 1970s, are present as embellished reworks in this exhibition. They still hold much of their original power. As most of these were completed in a cold studio, goosebumps and hard nipples in works such as Masterpiece and Boobies in Sugar (both 2024) reveal both economic and environmental effects on the body of the artist.
For her neon light works, preparatory drawings are blown up via photocopier and then each colour tube of silicon is woven and tied off by technicians. This is a complex process that Burman observes to make sure each work is as she wants it. There are a number of examples around the space. They include a pigeon, an ice cream cone with a mouth ready to eat it and the words Shine and Love (2021) which were part of the Tate Britain Winter Commission. Titled remembering a brave new world, this magnificent installation was created to cover the façade of Tate Britain in vinyl and lights to coincide with the Hindu festival of Diwali and bring hope during lockdown. It was a way for the artist to recall memories of Blackpool illuminations and connect them with her spiritual upbringing in a victory of light over darkness. Its title is perhaps a tongue in cheek nod to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision from his 1932 novel Brave New World in which loss of identity and control threaten to consume his characters. This is uncannily representative of the political and social landscape we presently find ourselves in. Consumerism and Capitalism have a stranglehold on society and companies like Palantir, Apple, Microsoft and xAI exert technological control over our lives. Burman’s public technicolour representation offered an alternative sense of hope for the future in which Hindu deities such as Kali, goddess of liberation and power, challenge symbolic figures of empire such as Britannia and in doing so celebrate new beginnings and a route to higher consciousness.
I’m a Mess (2022-2025) is a powerful mixed-media painting in the exhibition. A beautiful Bollywood actress rendered in brilliant colour offers a knowing side eye to the viewer. She is adorned with glittery stickers, rhinestones and bindis, masking her true form with glitzy distraction. Huge black tears sit on either side of her face as the word ‘HEALS’ trails down her arm is crystals. Framed in a green border reminiscent of growing mould, she is trapped alone in the confines of a white box. Created during the Covid 19 pandemic, Burman is reflecting on how she felt at this time. Knowing the disproportionate effect the pandemic had and is still having on Black and South Asian communities, this piece holds even more poignancy. Whether this was through higher exposure risk while working in public facing roles, austerity cuts affecting those in underfunded urban areas, widespread health inequality or structural racism, testimony from communities and figures released by Public Health England are undeniable. Remembering lockdown and fearing the airborne contagion outside, Burman’s sentiments resonate with me too. It is certainly reflective of my confused feelings during those seemingly endless days of working from home in scruffs, messy hair tied up in, forgetting how to dress and how to ‘people’. Make-up seemed even more performative than usual, sometimes lazily applied when being observed onscreen by expectant faces. Like Burman’s film star, it was a mask worn indoors to cover my true feelings, an acceptable face in all of this frightening mess.
I waited at the end of her artist’s talk to ask for some parting wisdom, as a woman navigating the art world myself I wondered what she had learned over the years that could impart to others in the industry. Her response was this, “when working with galleries, double check the background of male members of staff”. I don’t know what I was expecting but this struck a chord with me. Most often these behaviours are left unsaid and unchecked and, when they are, go unpunished. It caught me off guard but did not surprise me in the least. ‘It can all get a bit ‘Me Too’, trust me I know.” This felt even more familiar and hit me right where it hurts having experienced these behaviours multiple times myself in the past. Despite being a part of it for four decades, Burman is unfazed by a business she feels is over rated and under regulated. I wanted to ask her more but she was quite rightly swept off to be ready for the opening of Lubaina Himid’s Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025 exhibition at ICA in London. It left me thinking about the advances we have seen for women in the art world, especially in the past ten years. No more so than when observing Burman at her first solo exhibition in her hometown and knowing she would then travel to meet with a group of women artists who have gone from being art world agitators in a hostile white-centric environment to household names with successful careers of their own. In speaking with her today, she feels there is still much to learn and change, I completely agree with her that the work is not complete yet. It feels like we’re just getting started and I thank Burman for being one of the voices so ready and willing to say it how it is. You can’t beat Merseysiders for that.
Kirsty Jukes is an art historian and writer from Lancashire.
Chila Burman: I Love You Southport, The Atkinson, Southport 21 June – 15 November 2025.
This review is supported by The Atkinson.
Published 29.07.2025 by Natalie Hughes in Reviews
2,231 words