Shumon Basar

Shumon Basar (born 15 October 1974) is a British writer, editor and curator.

Basar was born in Pabna, Bangladesh, in 1974. His mother Dilruba Basar emigrated with him to the United Kingdom, to join his father, Abul Basar, who had already settled to work as a medical psychiatrist. Two years later, his sister Dahlia was born in Bradford. The family lived in several Northern towns and cities until they settled in Blackpool in 1985. Basar attended Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University as undergraduate between 1993 and 1996. He was supervised by Peter Carl and wrote his final year dissertation on Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film Pierrot le fou. Between 1998 and 2000 he studied at the AA School, London, and took classes with the film theorist Laura Mulvey, the writer Guy Mannes-Abbott and the psychoanalyst/theorist Mark Cousins. In 2005 Basar was invited by Eyal Weizman to join a new doctoral program within the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2009, Basar has lived in Dubai, Vancouver, Berlin, Beirut, Istanbul, and travelled extensively through the Middle East.

The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, co-authored with the novelist Douglas Coupland and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, was published in 2015 by Penguin Books in the UK, Blue Rider Press in the US and Eichborn in Germany. Designed by Wayne Daly, it is modelled around the influential paperback The Medium is the Massage, by Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore and Jerome Agel, which was first published in 1967. The Age of Earthquakes updates McLuhan's pronouncements to the Internet reliant, early 21st century and claims that, "we haven't just changed our brains these past few years. We've changed the structure of the planet". Quickfire slogans and statistics, often culled from the Web, are overlaid on images sourced from over 30 contemporary artists including Liam Gillick, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Rosemarie Trockel, Michael Stipe, Cao Fei, Amalia Ulman, Cécile B. Evans, Yuri Pattison, GCC and others. Pacific Standard magazine described it as "a kind of philosophical Anarchist Cookbook for the online era"; Jon Snow on Channel 4 News called it "absolutely amazing"; Vice.com characterised it as "a new philosophy-cum-modern-self-help book"; and Dazed said it was a "guidebook, map for today and mediation on the madness of our media, it's an awesome, dizzying read."

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