Keeping His Word

Writer Shumon Basar knows how to keep busy, from working on a never-ending novel to curating roaming exhibitions   For Shumon Basar, home smells like distance. ‘I moved to the UK with my mother in 1976 to join my father, who’d been living there already,' he explains. 'Very early on I knew and loved ABBA. My parents had their album, Arrival. It came out in 1976. It’s the same age as I have been “English.”’ He cringes as he shares memories of how seriously he used to take himself, indignant towards anyone who didn’t take the world as seriously as he or Franz Kafka did. He describes his younger self as ambitious, pretentious and lucky to have had any friends.   Before the interview, Basar warned me about Googling him, ‘because the web is made up of outmoded information about people, but presents it as though it’s all in the current moment. Google is reliable about things that are no longer true.’ But still, I couldn’t resist. Within this search engine e-world he is or is not a curator/editor/novelist based or not based in London/Dubai/Istanbul. So why has he now chosen to settle on the term ‘writer’? ‘In my 20s, I spent too much time over the anxiety of self-labelling. Total waste of energy. Getting older allows you to relax over labels. I describe what I feel closest to: writing. Everything else derives from that, is a version of that.’   Basar knows how to keep busy. He is Editor-at-Large of Tank Magazine, a forward-thinking London-based publication that focuses on 'informed, articulate and original style, photography, art and writing', as well as a contributing editor to Bidoun. He recently co-curated an audio-based show on literature titled Translated By  – an exhibition without visuals. It made its way from London to Kitakyushu and then to Istanbul, where Basar spent September carrying out a writing residency, working on a novel set in Dubai that refuses to end.   Basar has ‘technically’ been working on this text for four years. ‘In reality, probably ever since I landed in Dubai in December 2005. I didn’t know I was going to write a novel set there, but the ideas that are informing it date back to that arrival.’ Titled World!World!World!, it takes place at the beginning of the (most recent) global financial crisis. It follows a man in search of a woman who disappears from him at the start of the 21st century. He stumbles upon a disrupted future and is presented with the opportunity to envision an alternate tomorrow, one in which he can find this woman.   Among other things, the supposed ‘zero quality’ of Dubai is explored in the novel. What Dubai and other newly-built cities have in common, Basar explains, is the ‘from scratch’ language that accompanies their urban and infrastructural development projects. References are made to a lack of history, which is deceiving. ‘Nowhere is nothing. Everywhere has histories.’ Certain traditions however, like Bedouin culture, do not have as much of a tangible legacy, enabling the discourse of ‘zeroness’ to be developed for ideological and commercial purposes, he elaborates, allowing for historical narratives to be hijacked. ‘See how we accelerate from nothing to this? From pre-industrial to post-industrial? See how modern we have suddenly become?’ Dubai, Basar explains, is often approached and problematised within one of two frameworks: human rights and (bad) taste. ‘Very few people have made the effort to use the periscope needed to look over these limiting clichés.’   Most recently, Basar commissioned the seventh iteration of Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum, entitled It Means This. The forum, directed by Istanbul-based writer and editor HG Masters, explored the notion of ‘definitionism’. Invited speakers critically engaged with the terms and concepts we use to make sense of the world and to articulate our understanding of it. ‘I’m kind of with Wittgenstein when he wrote at the start of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that “the world is all that is the case.” Which is to say: we know what we know through the language we invent and use to describe the world and our knowledge of it. Contemporary reality is often ahead of our ability to describe it, because we are still left behind in the terminology of the previous era or moment. Such a schism leads to blindness about what is actually happening to us, around us. This is why we need language to evolve, extend and spew up neologisms – which is one of the terms we will be redefining in the Forum.’   I ask him about working within the undefined borders of the vaguely titled ‘art world’ – an imagined space that can be simultaneously inclusive and exclusive, engaging and obstructive, inspiring and frustrating. Basar calls the particular art contexts in which he operates satisfyingly open in terms of the possible subjects that can be explored within them, and the forms that an engagement with these subjects can take. He does, however, sigh at the, ‘“International Standards of Taste" that turn everywhere into somewhere less interesting.’ You don’t have to be boring to be intelligent, he points out. As for his thoughts on the attempt to turn places like Dubai and Doha into ‘art cities’, he thinks such efforts are flawed. A great city will be able to facilitate interesting work, he explains, because good art is nurtured by the energy of riveting places. The presence of intriguing art doesn't necessarily make a city that houses it an interesting place. As for the term ‘art cities’ itself? ‘I’d fire the marketing team that invented it.’   When I finally ask Basar when he envisions finishing his Dubai novel, he replies, ‘That specific question causes me to curl up into a nerve-wrecking blubbering ball.’ After a pensive pause, he adds: ‘I hope I finish it while I’m alive.’   Photography: Mustafa Dedeoglu & Begüm Göktas