Ansuman Biswas Ansuman Biswas was born in Calcutta and educated in the UK. He now has an international practice encompassing music, film, live art, installation, writing and theatre. He is interested in borders, grey areas and connections - between music, dance and visual art, for instance, or between science, art and industry. Consequently he works in a wide variety of contexts and has developed an interdisciplinary practice which traverses, translates and transposes across different kinds of borders.
One example of this border-crossing is his interest in the mapping of Vedic and Buddhist thought to modern debates in science and philosophy. Another example is his engagement with research practices which oscillate between science and art.
He sits on the Board of Directors of Arts Catalyst, a UK based science art agency. He has been artist-in-residence at the National Institute of Medical Research, UK. He is an Associate Artist at Battersea Arts Centre, on the Advisory Faculty at Maine Summer Dramatic Institute, a member of the Kira Institute, a cross-disciplinary colloquium on Philosophy of Science at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and contributor to a pioneering study on Cultural Utilisation of the International Space Station, for the European Space Agency.
He has shown visual and time-based work at The Tate Modern, The South London Gallery, The Whitechapel Gallery, the ICA and many other galleries and museums around the world. He also runs projects with diverse partners in Europe, USA, Africa and Asia and has been artist-in-residence at the Headlands Centre, San Francisco, the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, China and at NICA (Networking Initatives in Culture and the Arts) Yangon, Myanmar.
He has worked as a composer and musician in a wide range of contexts including Channel Four, MTV, the Royal Opera House, and the Royal National Theatre and also with Bjork, Courtney Pine, The Specials, Asian Dub Foundation, Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney, Oasis, Cornershop, and The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. His film and theatre composition and acting credits are also extensive.
Over the last few years his work has included directing Shakespeare in America, translating Tagore, making underwater sculptures in the Red Sea, living with Bauls, being employed as an ornamental hermit in the English countryside, travelling with the Mongolian State Shaman in the Gobi Desert, collaborating with neuroscientists in Arizona, touring with Björk, spending two days blindfolded in the wilderness, co-ordinating grassroots activists in Soweto, being sealed in a box for ten days with no food or light, making musical theatre in a maximum security prison, running seminars on democracy for monks in a Burmese monastery, and even flying on a real magic carpet in Russia.
Recent work includes CAT, a comparative study of quantum physics and the Indian science of vipassana meditation. For this piece the artist was sealed, with nothing but drinking water, in a lightproof and soundproof box for ten days.
CAT is the first part of a trilogy of which the second part is Self/Portrait, a live art work using computers, video imagery, ECG machines and meditative practices. The essential concern is to examine the relationship between objective measurements of Heart Rate Variability and the subjective experience of emotional states.
The third part of this trilogy is a large-scale work, Array, which is inspired by meditation, radio astronomy and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. It consists of twelve bowls placed in a circle of 4,000 mile radius centred on the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, transforming the planet earth into an eyeball.
Together this trilogy details a scientific/artistic approach to phenomena at the fundamental, human and cosmic levels. Apart from this large-scale project Ansuman continues to develop a number of other projects. For instance, in collaboration with Jem Finer, he undertook a parabolic zero gravity flight in Star City, Moscow, presenting a performance and an installation in weightless conditions. The performance consisted of them dressed as rather flamboyant genies flying around on magic carpets. The collaboration continues with further space-art events in the near future.