2024
Flatbread Library
Toronto Biennial of Art, Canada
Curated by: Dominique Fontaine and Miguel A. López
Co-commissioned and co-presented with the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, with residency support from the Stonecroft Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts
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.
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.
—Sunny Kerr
The artist would like to further thank Emelie Chhangur, Sunny Kerr, Kelby Paquette-Anderson, Ryan Laidman, Isabella Altoé, Mary Kim, Ilana Shamoon, Tetyana Herych, and the Zughaiyer family.
Photos by Toni Hafkensheid and Sameer Farooq
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Next project: → Ascension (Onions)
Previous project: ← Beijing, Beijing














