I want to be alone.

Sarah Kent talks to performance artist Ansuman Biswas about death, destruction and why his stint as the Manchester Hermit is a serious kind of a game

The Manchester Hermit is now ensconced in the Gothic tower of the museum where, over the course of 40 days and 40 nights, he is entirely alone, only able to share his thoughts with the outside world via a daily blog and the ubiquitous Twitter. Shortly before his retreat, I visited Ansuman Biswas in his north London home. ‘I’ll be engaging in public discourse, but in virtual mode,’ he says. ‘You often see people stuck to their laptops, not relating to anyone around them; the more populous the world gets, the more hermetically sealed we become, and my isolation will raise this as an issue.’

With his shaven head, the Calcutta-born artist already looks like an ascetic. ‘If I had the guts, I would be a monk or a hermit,’ he confirms. ‘But if I really wanted to be a hermit, I wouldn’t tell anyone. So this is a performance; I’m playing, but it’s a serious game.’

Escaping the daily grind for an ivory tower might sound like paradise, but there is a downside. Biswas is under 24-hour surveillance, so visitors can watch his every move on screen. ‘It will be a very unnatural situation,’ he explains. ‘I’ll be more like a tiger in a cage than a true hermit. And it’ll be dangerous for me, because l’ll want to look good and this will compromise my meditation. I hate make-believe; I’ll be engaging in a performance but it has to be real, not pretend.’

The isolation shouldn’t be a problem, though. Once or twice a year Biswas goes on a ten-day retreat to practice vipassanā meditation, which involves focusing exclusively on physical sensations. And a decade ago he spent ten days incarcerated in a box at the South London Gallery, without food or light. ‘Some of the time I didn’t know whether I was awake or asleep,’ he recalls, ‘because my thoughts and dreams began melding together. I was worried about what would happen to my eyes after so long in total darkness, but they didn’t atrophy or turn to custard.’

In the tower, the first thing he did was to clean and organise the space. Then he began structuring his time; he intends to keep busy writing poetry, moving in ways resembling yoga, tai chi and dance, and playing the sarod and tabla, in which he specialised for his music degree at Dartington College. He will also play instruments from the Museum’s collection. ‘When I meditate I become aware that things are in flux and decaying,’ he says. ‘The process of living involves destroying things; if you play an instrument, eventually it breaks; so is it better to preserve it in a glass case, or to use it? I’m not being didactic, but these issues are there to be raised.’

The museum has a large collection of stuffed birds. Biswas plans to make a pile of all the endangered species and then photograph it. ‘It will be a beautiful but horrific image, reminiscent of Belsen,’ he says. ‘All those birds collected for their sumptuous plumage and different types of beak or talons will become just a load of biomass, a reminder that it’s important to pay attention to the things we normally don’t bother about.’

He is also drawing on other objects from the collection. The museum contains over four million items, many of which are permanently in store. The artist has chosen 40 of these hidden relics, and, each day, will choose a different one on which to focus his attention. His first – and deliberately contentious – choice was a human skull.

Most of the items in the Museum’s stores were amassed during the Victorian era, when people commonly believed that all life on the planet was subject to our sovereign will, an assumption Biswas is keen to challenge.

‘I’m asking what right we have to take things from the environment and put them in a museum,’ he says. ‘It’s not good enough to adopt the Victorian ethos, lording it over a world that we hold ourselves above. We are part of an ecosystem in crisis and, if we don’t realise how dependent we are on things, some species will be lost before we’ve even found them. Our attitude reminds me of an ape sawing through the branch it is sitting on, without noticing the danger it is in.’

Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, argues that, as neutral places, museums are uniquely placed to safeguard cultural artefacts. Does Biswas agree? ‘The role of guardian is important,’ he replies, ‘but it is not unambiguous. I’m instigating a debate around ownership and value – who, in the postcolonial era, values what. And unless someone offers a convincing argument to save them, I’m going to destroy all the items I’ve chosen.’

My jaw drops. Manchester Museum is renowned for its ancient Egyptian collection. Might he smash up an Egyptian mummy? ‘It’s possible,’ he says. ‘I’m not making judgments or moralising. I’m hoping for a consensus, but if there’s disagreement, I’ll work to find a rapprochement.’

Punters have already dubbed him the David Blaine of the art world. Won’t people see him as an exhibitionist, rather than someone addressing serious issues? ‘I may be setting myself up for ridicule,’ he acknowledges, ‘but I hope I will get some considered responses. By putting myself on display, I become the ultimate exhibit; it’s not about presenting myself to others but exploring the dictum “know thyself”. It is the kind of introspection happening in ecology as we realise how much the human species is affecting the planet. I think of it as sculpting the self, from the inside.’

After his release, Biswas will return to normal life, producing things like poetry and music that he describes as ‘difficult to hold onto, because there’s nothing to grasp. Artworks are epiphenomena, sloughed off like dead skin. They are great as records, but I don’t think they should be fetishised.’

Biswas will appear at the Big Chill in August with his band, Newanderthal and, at London’s Donmar Warehouse, will perform the music he wrote for Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s play, Life is a Dream. The play’s synopsis reads: ‘To protect the country from the horrors prophesied, Segismundo is banished to a secret world high in the mountains and cut off from the sun (where) he can only dream of a life reversed.’

Change the hero’s name to Biswas and ‘mountains’ to ‘tower’ and it sounds like an apt description of the Manchester hermitage.

Ansuman Biswas remains in his hermitage at Manchester Museum until 5 August 2009. Read his blog here. Sarah Kent is best known as the visual arts editor art of Time Out London. She has also contributed to numerous art magazines, written catalogues for galleries such as the Hayward, ICA, Saatchi Gallery, White Cube and Haunch of Venison and published books such as Shark-Infested Waters (Philip Wilson, 1994), an overview of YBA art written for theSaatchi Gallery . Kent was formerly Director of Exhibitions at the ICA the late 1970s.

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