The British artist Chila Kumari Singh Burman’s Liberty and Light combines the pacifist message of Pablo Picasso's Guernica with the iconography of her own rich Hindu-Punjabi cultural heritage. The 20th-century masterpiece provides her inspiration for condemning today’s global turbulences. A succession of pandemic crises, wars and climate-change threats have framed the first decades of the 21st century.  Her response to this apocalyptic state is the symbolic and real light produced by an installation designed to lift the spirits of its spectators. A deployment of brilliant neon sculptures: colourful candies, tuk-tuks from south-east Asia, Hindu gods and goddesses, wild animals (bees, flamingos, snakes) and lots of flowers. New sculptures as well as recycled ones from previous projects, in a gesture of commitment to sustainable practices. An explosion of light and colour in a collective context of darkness.

Chila Kumari Singh Burman is celebrated for her radical feminist practice which examines representation, gender and cultural identity. Challenging stereotypes relating to women from southern Asia in the United Kingdom, she has worked with engravings, sketches and paintings and made installations and films. A key figure in the 1980s British Black Arts movement, she uses self-portraits as a tool for empowerment and self-determination. She was selected as the fourth artist to complete the Tate Britain 2020 Winter Commission, and has since received a series of commissions from British cultural institutions including the FACT, Liverpool City Council and the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool. She received an honorary doctorate in 2017 and an honorary fellowship at the London University of Arts, and was awarded an MBE in 2022 for services to British arts. Burman has exhibited throughout the world and her works can be found in several prestigious public collections.