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Ansuman Biswas was born in Calcutta, educated in England and has developed an international practice in a wide variety of contexts including music, film, live art, installation, writing and theatre. Over the last fifteen years this practice has encompassed directing Shakespeare in America, translating Tagore's poetry from the Bengali, making underwater sculptures in the Red Sea, living with wandering minstrels in India, being employed as an ornamental hermit in the English countryside, travelling with shamans in the Gobi Desert, working with neuroscientists in Arizona, touring with Björk, spending two days blindfolded on Exmoor, playing with Oasis, co-ordinating grassroots activists in Soweto, being sealed in a box for ten days with no food or light, making a musical in a maximum security prison, holding seminars with monks in a Burmese monastery, and flying on a magic carpet in Russia. He runs ongoing projects with diverse partners in Europe, US, Africa and Asia and has been artist-in-residence at the National Institute of Medical Research in London, at the Headlands Centre, San Francisco, the Guangdong Modern Dance Company, China and at NICA (Networking Initiatives in Culture and the Arts), Burma. He has shown visual and time-based work at The Tate Modern, The South London Gallery, The Whitechapel Gallery, the ICA, the Edinburgh Festival, The Barbican Centre, the Sonic Arts Network, The Liverpool Biennial, The National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, District 6, Cape Town, The Yerba Buena Centre, San Francisco, and even in zero gravity! (see zerogenie.org) While working in a number of conventional genres within visual art, music, and theatre, Ansuman is particularly interested in interdisciplinary practice. His main research interest is in the present day application of principles drawn from ancient Indian philosophy - principles which are as relevant to modern scientific methodology as they are to improvisation techniques for the actor. Recent art works focussing on this theme include 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 was the first part of a trilogy and was followed by Self/Portrait, a live artwork using computers, video imagery, ECG machines and meditative practices to explore the links between emotions and physicality. The third part of the trilogy is a large-scale work, Array, 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. CAT, Self/Portrait and Array, taken together, detail a scientific/artistic approach to phenomena at the fundamental, human and cosmic levels. For Art and Sacred Places Biswas worked with Portsmouth
Cathedral - see Six Sacred Sites 2005/7
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