Sumugan Sivanesan is an anti-disciplinary artist, researcher and writer whose interests include: migrant histories, minority politics, activist media, artist infrastructures and more-than-human rights. His artistic research project fugitive radio develops live collectively-realised modes of ‘performance-radio’ alongside a monthly podcast, ‘fugitive frequency’, concerned with anticolonial, migrant and queer issues and music. fugitive radio was initiated in Helsinki in partnership with Pixelache and with support from the Kone Foundation (2020–21). It participated in documenta fifteen (2022) curated by Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa as part of lumbung radio programmed by Station of Commons. Sumugan is currently in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht.

Sumugan earned a doctorate from the Transforming Cultures research centre at the University of Technology Sydney (2014). He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for English and American Studies (Cultural Studies), University of Potsdam (2016) supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) to research ‘Urban Eco-politics of the Anthropocene’, blogging at: shadowofthefuture.org.

He has received grants from Australia Council for the Arts Individual Projects (2022), Kone Foundation, Finland (2021, 2020), Create New South Wales 360 Visions virtual reality development program (2017), Australia Council for the Arts Literature (2014), Australia Council for the Arts Emerging and Experimental Arts (2013) and Australia Council for the Arts Music Board (2008, 2005) among others. He was awarded a Saari International Artist Residency, Finland in September–October 2021 and was the Australia Council for the Arts resident at Heslinki International Artist Programme (HIAP), February–May 2022.

With the artist and writer Tessa Zettel he co-founded The T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society during a two month residency at the Nida Art Colony to develop a work for its 2018 Inter-format Symposium ‘On Rites and Terrabytes.’This follows on from their multispecies urban/artistic research project, Plan Bienen.

He was selected to participate in the Onassis AiR collaborative research residency, School of Infinite Rehearsals, Movement I in Athens, September–October 2020.

In July 2022 he participated in the third Digital Naturalism Conference (Dinacon) hosted by the grassroots peace-building and social enterprise organisation DreamSpace Academy in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

In November 2018 he took part in the inaugural international artists residency at Insituto Procomun LABxS Santos, Brazil. Here he initiated Lunch Against Work: Almoço Contra o Trabalho, a social kitchen/laboratory for developing knowledge about plants, poverty, foraging and food systems.

Late in 2014 he undertook a two month residency with the Faculty of Arts, University of Peradeniya, funded by the Australia Council for the Arts Literature (2014) and Arts NSW (2014). Here he initiated a critical writing and micro-publishing project, Theoretically Tamil.

Sumugan has featured in events and exhibitions including: documenta fifteen (2022), Helsinki International Artist Programme (2021), Pixelache Festival #BURN____2021 (Helsinki), nadine laboratory for contemporary arts (Brussels 2020), Akademie Schloss Solitude (2020), Tehai (Dhaka 2020), Frame Contemporary Art (Helsinki 2019), The Floating University Berlin (2019), EX-EMBASSY (Berlin 2018), BE.BoP 2018: Black Europe Body Politics, Maxim Gorki Theatre (Berlin, 2018), Nida Art Colony Inter-format Symposium (Lithuania, 2018), Art Laboratory Berlin (2015), ZK/U Centre for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin (2015, 2014), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2014), The Reading Room (Bangkok 2013), Performance Space (Sydney 2013), Yautepec Gallery (Mexico City 2011) and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney 2011, 2010). He was a member of the experimental documentary collective theweathergroup_U who formed for the Bienale of Sydney 2008. He was active with media/art gang boat-people.org who engaged Australian publics in issues of borders, race and nationalism between 2002 and 2014. He has works in the MOMENTUM Worldwide collection and in private collections.

His published writing on art and culture are collected at slowtheory.org.

Academic Publications:
'Movements of Minorities: AusLankans Struggle for Transnational Justice', (book chapter). In Kandasamy, N., Perera, N., Ratnam, C. (eds) A Sense of Viidu: The (re)creation of 'home' by the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Australia, Palgrave Macmillan, March 2020.

'Alex & I: Narrative and network resistance.' Social Identities, August 2018. [PDF 1.1MB]

'Eco-politics, for teh Lulz: Transmedia Civil Disobedience in the Age of Fossil-Fuelled Information Capitalism' Critical Habitations: Pluralising Practices, December 2016.

'Alex & I: Against Indifference', Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol 8. no. 1, March 2016.

'Plan Bienen: Sharing (in) the more-than-human city.' (with Tessa Zettel) A Peer Review Journal About: Excessive Research, vol. 5, no. 1, DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Centre), Aarhus University, School of Communication and Culture, February 2016.

'Alex & I: In proximity to the Other of politics', Law Text Culture: Re-Orientating Hospitality, Re-Orientating Law, vol. 17 iss. 1, February 2014.

Select Arts & CulturePublications:
‘The T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society Bulletin, Summer 2086.’ In Michelkevicius, V (ed) Nida Art Colon, Log No. 9: On Lines & Rituals, Vilnius Academy of Arts, Neringa 2019.

'Queering and Quaring Virtual Space,' Runway #35 Space, December 2017.

'Mass Action Media: Ende Gelände, Break Free 2016.' un Magazine, iss.10.2, October 2016.

‘Institutional Reform: Art as Anti-Statecraft.’ Runway #30, Ecologies, 2016.

CV [PDF]