Sameer Farooq

practice – an archeology of the present – is location-based, and is in dialogue with diverse cultural communities. He investigates tactics of representation and enlists the tools of installation, print media, and the methods of anthropology to explore various forms of collecting, interpreting, and display. In this way, his projects aim to build alternative structures to incorporate the multiple stories, simultaneous experiences, and shared fictions that make our lives so unwieldy. The result is often a collaborative work which counterbalances how dominant institutions speak about our lives: a counter-museum, new additions to an existing archive, or a buried history made visible.

His current research is focused on how to materialize the invisible within the museum: the shape inside of our digital trashcans, fragments of gossip overheard, and the stooping body expressing ‘overwhelm-ment’ which must find a rightful place beside our masks, tools, and manuscripts. His residency will centre around the creation of language-based works culled from the headlines of newspapers in Toronto published by specific cultural communities. In Toronto where “diversity” is used as a currency to construct the global city, what insights do these sources offer when their voices are elevated through several material techniques?