Focal Point: Sameer Farooq
Sameer Farooq, A Heap of Random Sweepings, 2021. Installation view, Photo: Toni Hafkensheid, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALERIE NICOLAS ROBERT.
Sameer Farooq is a self-described systems thinker who takes a bird’s-eye view of how the theatre of its production frames a subject. This involves creating faithful, paper-thin ceramic replicas of the poufs and weights museum collection handlers use to store fragile artifacts. Or glazed slabs of various flatbreads worldwide to explore the relationship between clay and dough and the intersecting histories of global foodways.
Farooq’s interdisciplinary practice, which includes sculpture, photography, documentary film and installation, is grounded in post-colonial anthropological methods.
“It’s like an attempt to get at a documentary truth,” he describes his approach. “Not only looking at the primary document but looking at the marginalia, looking at the table that the thing was sitting on, looking at the culture that this thing was a part of.”
Sameer Farooq, The Fairest Order in the World, 2023. Installation view, Photo: Steve Farmer, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALERIE NICOLAS ROBERT.
Those concerns for the invisible labour and processes of an institutional encyclopedic collection culminated in his first major solo exhibition, A Heap of Random Sweepings (Koffler Gallery, 2021). The ambitious immersive installation explored how museums are marked by the absent legacies of ceramic-based anthropological artifacts, like vessels, spearheads and Buddha statues. Set within a meditative audio environment composed by Los Angeles-based noise musician Gabie Strong, visitors were guided through works that explored what it meant for those objects to be held captive by provenance and repatriation.
Sameer Farooq, The Fairest Order in the World, 2023. Installation view, Photo: Steve Farmer, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALERIE NICOLAS ROBERT.
Sameer Farooq at the Stonecroft Artist in Residency, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen University, 2024, Photo: Viara Mileva.
Farooq’s latest commission signals a shift from the museum’s colonial display to the age-old sites of commerce and exchange — food markets and bakeries — and staple food, the flatbread. The Flatbread Library is a large-scale sculpture at the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art, gathering an archive of local bread production to reflect migration into the city.
“I've collected hundreds and hundreds of bread from all around Toronto, from Afghan naan to Palestinian taboon bread, to French fougasse, Ethiopian and Eritrean injera, shoti poori from Georgia, and, of course, roti, pita, tandoori naan, and tortillas,” he lists off. “I've amassed this huge collection of bread, and what I'm doing is listening to the bread and thinking of the archive as not being taxonomical but being woven.”
In employing all these post-colonial anthropological methods—the ghostly presence of an artifact, the woven histories of a staple food central to the formations of many early civilizations—Farooq remains the systems thinker, going deep into its genealogies of processes and meanings. What is unearthed, increasingly, is the value and labour of craft-based knowledge.
Sameer Farooq, Flatbread Library, 2024. Installation view, bread, wood, netting and fabric. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid, COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND GALERIE NICOLAS ROBERT.
Rea McNamara is the recipient of the Jean Johnson Craft Writing Award, which supports emerging careers in craft discourse and furthers the appreciation and understanding of craft in Canada.
This article is an excerpt and is available in full in the Fall/Winter 2024-2025 issue of Studio Magazine.
