Making Art Through the Apocalypse | Shumon Basar

Meet Shumon Basar: writer, curator, cultural theorist, and commissioner of the Global Art Forum. Together with Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist, he co-authored The Age of Earthquakes and The Extreme Self, helping give language to the strange realities of life online.

Shumon also coined endcore and hoperot — two essential modi operandi for navigating contemporary life.

As part of CIFRA’s upcoming season exploring power — how it operates, hides, and shapes our lives — we met Shumon at Art Dubai to discuss apocalypse aesthetics, the role of artists in uncertain times, Big Tech’s ongoing quest to develop taste, and the technological unconscious quietly influencing how we think, feel, and behave.

Think of it as a survival guide for anyone currently oscillating between doomscrolling and hopemaxxing.