Exhibition

Dalhousie Art Gallery, 2023 (touring 2024-2027)
Photo documentation by Steve Farmer

In this first exhibition in his home province of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton born, Toronto based artist Sameer Farooq presents a new installation that offers a deeply poetic space to reflect on the fraught and violent histories of art and anthropological museums, their colonial origins, structures, and impulses.

With The Fairest Order in the World, Farooq probes notions of provenance, repatriation, and repair, composing a series of new and recent sculptures and images to articulate unique ideas for repurposing the emptied spaces of museums devoid of their spoils. Mining the possibilities offered by sustained engagement, Farooq invites us to envision what the museum might become through the mechanics of restitution, what it may shift to collect and document, and what kind of experiences it could nurture.

The installation elicits prolonged attention, asking visitors to look intently and to spend time with the objects, contemplating their physical and emotional presence as well as the absences they evoke. The artworks may serve as tools for meditation, revealing a deeper potential that transcends their aesthetic value. An audio environment composed by Farooq's collaborator Gabie Strong (Los Angeles, CA) sets a deliberately slow pace, encouraging six-minute intervals at each vantage point. Lyrical texts contributed by poet Jared Stanley (Reno, NV) unsettle the rigid format of institutional labels and imagine the objects' own voices. Farooq’s film produced in collaboration with Mirjam Linschooten (Amsterdam, NL), The Museum Visits a Therapist, offers a reflection on trauma and recovery, personifying the museum and imagining therapeutic strategies for healing historic wounds.

The exhibition takes its title from a text fragment of Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: "The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings." Contained in this duality of opposites is the idea that the most organized and just attempt at a universal order is equally as flawed or filled with balance and beauty as an arbitrary pile of refuse. Considering this paradox, Farooq's meticulously choreographed assembly invites us to interrogate our relationship with art objects and museum displays, as well as the ordering narratives they uphold.

Artist Info

Sameer Farooq is a Canadian artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent. With a versatile approach that shifts between sculpture, photography, documentary film, 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.

Sameer Farooq has held exhibitions at institutions around the world including the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023), Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden (2023), Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff (2023), Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax (2023), Fonderie Darling, Montréal (2022); Susan Hobbs, Toronto (2022); Koffler Gallery, Toronto (2021); Patel Brown, 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, Artnet, The Huffington Post, and C Magazine. He is an alumni of the prestigious Bemis Center Residency and has been longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2024, 2019, 2018 and 2017). Farooq is represented by Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montréal/Toronto.