This month we are pleased to welcome our April resident Sameer Farooq.

“While in London I will be researching the collections of several encyclopaedic museums and thinking about how we can re-choreograph their objects to broaden our understanding of history. This will involve trying to unfreeze “museum time.” The goal of my work is to always soften the edges of strict institutional categories and introduce surprising collisions and collaborations between different populations and regions.” 

Sameer Farooq 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 through traditional forms of collection, interpretation and display. Farooq foregrounds community-based models of knowledge production and an array of contemplative practices in order to suggest new ways of narrating our cultural histories. The result is often a collaborative work which counterbalances how dominant institutions speak about our lives: a counter-archive, new additions to a museum collection, or a buried history made visible.

This residency marks the beginning of an annual Toronto-focused residency in partnership with Canada<->International and Toronto Biennial of Art (TBA). TBA residency artists will be selected from their past and present editions, deepening their engagement both locally and internationally.

A special thank you to Zoë Foster & Alexandra Lambert for this collaboration.