Thasil Suhara Backer lives and works in Kodungallur, near the erstwhile Muziris region, in the Thrissur District of Kerala, India. He completed his Master of Performing Arts (MPA) at the University of Hyderabad and his Bachelor of Commerce at MES Asmabi College, University of Calicut, Kerala. He also trained in Theatre at the Intercultural Theatre Institute in Singapore. He was awarded the first rank for MPA at the University of Hyderabad in 2016 and the Young Artist Fellowship by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, in 2013. Thasil’s art projects explore geography, identity, materiality, and the body of human and non-human ecological realms. Through mediums such as performance, photo-video graphics, sculptural objects, text, and drawings; the entirety of this practice unfolds as a genre of image construction. To create an experience and contemplation between the physical and the conceptual.
His intuitive and evidence-based (re)search art projects are intimately tied to the everyday vernacular (in)capacities of both human and non-human body–mind consciousness, as well as the dynamic interrelations of Bio(logics), Cosmo(logics), and Meta(logics) of it, combining land narratives, the expansive narratives that link the personal and the larger posthuman forms with the broader context of terrestrial landscapes and techno spheres. Thasil’s artistic approach seeks to critically reimagine these multifaceted structural elements as a symbiotic whole. With formal training in hybrid practices of Theatre Arts and performance practices, Thasil’s distinct interest and self-learning in visual culture both empower him to cut across the narrow confines of forms and genres as a political persuasion.
Website and links: https://www.thasilsuharabacker.com/
Project:
We are dust, grown beneath the sea… Where does life belong? Is it life in the flesh or the mind? Or in data? Or somewhere else?
Through the organization of values embedded, stuck, crashed, erased, or deducted in materials, I intend to utilize found corporal and found ephemera and other various materials/matters/things and questions as an Anti-Data / counter-archive. The process seeks to represent opposing energies and their cosmic interconnectedness within a multi-dimensional, multi-directional, technological time-space continuum. I am intrigued by the exploration of the mythic dimensions that may emerge from such ephemera—melding data, invisibility, and mobility within geographical spaces and material manifestations.
As an individual who has grappled with chronic skin infections since early childhood, for me the contemplation of growth, death, materiality, and regeneration has evolved over the years from a simple existentialist inquiry into a provocative exploration encompassing both spiritual and biological dimensions and as a planetary containment, this also means of awareness of more than human nature that makes us function and co-habit. How does the low resolutions/down-dated of technologies and easily mobile parameters of technology intervene such mutuality? The struggle inherent with one’s flesh and its self underscores the primacy of the corporeal entity over the broader concept of the human body and the body as a concept at large. Amid aggressive sophistication fast updates how we conserve technological hardware and software forms. If the disintegration of our self’s flesh into discrete components, an event unfolds within and beyond the temporal frameworks of a day. Does self-remain after? If technologies are primarily invented to help the smooth functioning of mind inherited in the flesh and life sourced flesh-body, where do we refuge in a state of no flesh? And what are the new meanings and significance it left behind? How does data related to it changes in such questions and conditions. Does it open up new metaphysical correlations in the different space-time dimensions, as if data is sort manure to compose, articulated which is so familiar but no more visible or intolerable to be in being?
In this context I would like to ask, do we need to further deliberate apocalyptic scenarios as a prerequisite for envisaging the post-growth landscape characterized by incursion, assertive development, and the perturbation of what contemporary society adjudicates to be a natural order? Are we not currently cosmic tenants, of multi-dimensional space-time, in an apocalyptic earth complete with metaphysical hideaways facilitated by technological spheres? How does it denying, deducting, obsoleting, damaging and constantly updating the primordial instincts. What does it take to nurture unbridled optimism on Earth while some of us are busy brainstorming the end game? How do we make friend with this strange terror for peace?
Does the idea of dysfunctional, discarded, or used(less) objects or processes enable one to evoke stories of unpaid labor, exhaustion, and a sense of exclusion that one has to go through in today’s overstimulated local–hyper-hybrid-hyper world?
Does our planet belong to one big ocean? Is the ocean mazed us in an endless whirling mystic? Questions continue as long as life resists. Here the sea/ocean is a physical reality at the same time a mediating matter extending our invented borders and segregated race within and beyond several living species on our planet earth. To find our common relations.
The project will process a participatory platform that showcases paradoxical and complementary x material and immaterial in the forms of questions, still and moving images, objects, drawings, sound as a posthuman economy, as its ecology amid systems errors and disruption.
The paradoxes emerges from the organic and the artificial, mysteries of agency, identity, and the essence of being in erased elements as celestial remnants and the existence unfolds through the sophisticated low-tech dynamics of materiality and immateriality, encompassing data, materiality, and spirituality. Extending as a counter-archive consists puzzle of anti-data.