Sameer Farooq: 2024 Stonecroft Artist-in-Residence at Agnes Etherington Art Centre.

This residency supported Sameer Farooq’s artistic research into the global migration of flatbreads and enabled opportunities for learning exchanges around a newly commissioned artwork. Thanks to Stonecroft funds and the Canada Council for the Arts, Sameer Farooq was able to travel to Kingston for studio production time in May, June and July 2024. In the large studios of Ontario Hall, he produced Flatbread Library, a major installation co-commissioned by Agnes and the Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA) for exhibition in Toronto’s MOCA building as part of TBA 2024.

Informed by Farooq’s practice of critically reading and reimagining museum narrative strategies, Flatbread Library recognizes bread as a transgressive agent that troubles the idealized stability of both archival material and national identities. For the project, Farooq sourced flatbreads and frequented diasporic bakeries across the Greater Toronto Region. He used the deep and wide diversity of breads as sculptural materials to compose differing varieties across the surface of a large curtain-like form.

Farooq used techniques from his background in ceramics to solve the formal and material challenges in the creation of this sculptural installation. Chief among these, hanging dried and coated bread in a way that engages a multiplicity of the flatbreads’ migratory patterns across a surface that could evoke interwoven global emergences and relocations. Inspired by the “curtains” of sangak seen in the markets of current day Iran and now-Azerbaijan, the work presents hard, flat components in a manner suggestive of a soft, flowing textile form.

Farooq worked with student assistants Kelby Paquette-Anderson (production) and Isabella Machado Altoé (research), both generously funded by the Stonecroft Foundation. Altoé’s contributions were also supported in partnership with the Queen’s Cultural Studies Program, which allowed for broader hospitality and scholarly elaboration of the artist’s work. Art History intern, Annie Bueler helped with organizing residency travel and with building Farooq’s database of flatbread bakeries around Toronto.

The residency also facilitated Farooq’s creation of new monoprint works made by inking flatbreads and running them through a press. These were used in the Toronto Biennial’s Mobile Arts Curriculum tool in the form of an informative poster publication that accompanies the work. The publication provides members of the public and academic learning communities with opportunities to engage with Farooq’s practice, ideas, contexts and methods.

Studio, travel and accommodation support was essential to the residency’s impact. The residency also facilitated an ongoing conversation between Farooq and Agnes staff about museum practices that attend to collecting ethics and modes of adjacent energetic exchange.

As a complement to his time in Ontario Hall’s studios, Farooq delivered a lecture in Alejandro Arauz’s 4th year seminar in the Queen’s Fine Arts (Visual Art) Program.

Biography
Sameer Farooq (b. 1978; he/him) is a Toronto-based artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent. With a versatile approach that shifts between photography, documentary film, sculpture, and anthropological methods, he investigates strategies of representation to expand the ways through which museums have looked at the past. He works to redress the role of exhibition and collection-based practices by building community-based models of knowledge production. Farooq has held exhibitions at institutions around the world including Venice Architecture Biennale (2023), Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden (2023), Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff (2023), Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax (2023), Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto (2023), Fonderie Darling, Montréal (2022); Koffler Gallery, Toronto (2021); Lilley Museum, Reno (2019); Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2017); Institute of Islamic Culture, Paris (2017); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2016); The British Library, London (2015); Maquis Projects, Izmir (2015); Artellewa, Cairo (2014); and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2011). Reviews dedicated to his work have been published by Art Forum, Canadian Art, The Washington Post, BBC Culture, Hyperallergic, and Artnet.

The artist residency is generously funded by the Stonecroft Foundation. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts