Babar Suleman is an artist and writer, and holds a practice-led Doctor of Philosophy in Fine Art from the University of Oxford. A Fulbright scholar, they graduated with an MFA from Parsons School of Design (New York). Recent commissions and grants include b-side festival, Platform Art Projects, Art Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice, and Compton Verney Art Gallery’s Inclusive Histories Research Fellowship. Suleman is a Senior Lecturer in Filmmaking at the Manchester School of Art.
Through the foregrounding of place, body and personal voice in moving image and new media, Suleman investigates notions of love, worldmaking and magic in order to shift viewer perceptions about structures of coloniality, marginalised identities and self-determination.
The Augmented Reality and moving image work, Requital. (2022), brings together the lighthouse and the siren on a quarried island, the web-based artwork, ‘Carte de KhudiMagie' (2021), maps an emotional landscape onto an appropriated image from Google Earth with links to poetry addressed to the figure of the beloved. The film ‘HOW PERFECT IS THIS HOW BLESSED ARE WE’ (2021) superimposes an interior world on a British country house and landscape in order to give voice to grief, which can be read as both an ode to unrequited love and a critique of Empire and imperialism.
Babar’s interdisciplinary practice can alternatively be described as acts of slipping between realities and fantasies, blurring lines that seemed to exist rigidly just a moment before. In Unfeeling (2018), subject and object exchange places as a single moment of heartbreak unfurls slowly and almost imperceptibly. In Four Broken Hearts (2015), film, performance, site-specific experiences and social media work together in an original framework to create a transmedia story world that can be experienced ‘like life itself’. Seaphilia (2014) displaces sexuality from its conventional vessels, 24FRAMES (2014) catches constraints in the act of framing perceptions and Searching… (2014) locates romantic desire as the litmus test for spiritual machines. Even when flirting with the playful, a tender sincerity in a yearning for love and a desire for beauty is hard to miss.
