Babar Suleman - School of Digital Arts (SODA) – Manchester Metropolitan University

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 The Elephant Trust, British Council’s International Collaboration Grant awarded via b-side festival, Platform Art Projects, Art Council England’s Developing Your Creative Practice, and Compton Verney Art Gallery’s Inclusive Histories Research Fellowship. They have been invited to speak at various institutions including the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University and The Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge.

Postgraduate supervision

I am happy to supervise doctoral projects across all areas of art and film. Please contact me using my email address if you would like to discuss your proposal with me.

Research

Projects

Babar Suleman is looking for love and pleasure in a world that barely allows for it. Sometimes this search results in moving image and new media artworks.

The newest video artwork, ‘Bir Zevk / A Pleasure’ (2023), traces a summer fling in Türkiye through the many mobile apps that were involved, seamlessly combining contemporary romance and technology. The Augmented Reality and moving image work, Requital. (2022), brings together the lighthouse and the mythical 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 inner 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.

Artefacts

Suleman, M.B., 2022. 'HOW PERFECT IS THIS HOW BLESSED ARE WE', Compton Verney Art Gallery.

Suleman, M.B., 2022. 'Requital.', b-side festival, Isle of Portland.

Journal Articles

Suleman, B., 2024. 'Situating love and loss: making a film, re-making a world', Women's History Review, 33 (6), 10.

Suleman, M.B., 2014. 'Like life itself: Blurring the distinction between fiction and reality in the Four Broken Hearts transmedia storyworld', Journal of Media Practice, 15 (3), pp. 228-241.