Sameer Farooq’s library of flatbreads at the Toronto Biennial serves as a map of the city’s diasporic communities

Sameer Farooq’s elegant work The Flatbread Library, a spotlight of this yr’s Toronto Biennial of Artwork (till 1 December), was impressed by the artist’s 2019 go to to Pakistan along with his father.

Farooq—who grew up in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, the place his Pakistani father was a physician and Ugandan Ismaili mom a midwife—was staying within the mountainous area of Peshawar bordering Afghanistan along with his aunt. A visit to the native tandoor, a neighborhood bakery widespread in South Asia the place locals take their bread to be baked, proved revelatory.

“I used to be actually impressed sculpturally by all of the various kinds of bread there,” Farooq tells The Artwork Newspaper.“That they had totally different textures and stamps denoting particular bakeries and every bakery had its personal sample or motif printed on the bread.”

He explains that bakers will purchase bread stamps from woodworkers available in the market to place patterns on the bread and make different markings and indentations with their fingers to indicate a type of signature. Typically, they are going to place bread on carpets hanging from hooks, or they are going to lay it flat on rugs on the bottom as a type of show.

It was a eureka second for the Toronto-based artist, the place he reimagined flatbread as a type of textile, one he weaves collectively in his set up with grace and ingenuity. It was additionally the start of years of analysis into tandoors that took the artist to Turkey, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Morocco and Mexico. He found that all over the place, these ovens have been automobiles for constructing neighborhood.

“My dad at all times says that bread is just like the newspaper,” he says. “When the baker delivers bread door to door, she or he additionally spreads the information and the gossip of the neighborhood.”

He additionally realized that flatbread enjoys a type of universality, transcending borders and identities just like the Sufi traveller of the meals world—one thing that Farooq recognized with personally. He sees flatbreads as repositories of “embedded reminiscence” each collective and historic.

Knowledgeable by his apply of critically studying and reimagining museum narrative methods, the flatbread story quickly grew to become an obsession. In 2020, Farooq constructed a tandoor oven set up on the Scarborough Museum and, in February 2023, one other on the Materia Abiertaschool in Mexico Metropolis. In each instances, he held neighborhood gatherings across the ovens the place flatbread was baked and shared.

He additionally started to concentrate on the flatbread as an artwork materials, getting ready a present at Le 19 CRAC, a cultural centre within the French Alpine city of Montbeliard close to the Swiss border within the winter of 2023. That was a “maquette” for his Toronto Biennial challenge, he says.

With joint funding from the Toronto Biennial and the Agnes Etherington Artwork Centre at Queen’s College, the place he was an artist-in-residence earlier this yr, he started researching the various diasporic bakeries within the Better Toronto Space that used tandoors or other forms of neighborhood ovens to make flatbread. These ranged from Armenian, Indian and Mexican to Afghan, Iranian, Pakistani, Lebanese and different flatbread traditions. He additionally met a Gazan mom and her daughter who had their very own conventional clay oven on their porch the place they made Palestinian taboon. Farooq ready a particular booklet that includes interviews with the ladies in regards to the connection between their bread, their historical past and ancestral recollections of meals.

All of those breads are described intimately in a particular publication accompanying his Toronto Biennial exhibition, describing the fragile lavash from Iran, Armenia and Turkey, the Indian naan and roti, and the Mexican tortilla—every with its personal distinctive design, texture and flavour.

Drawing on his background as a ceramicist, Farooq makes use of a method employed in making clay tiles. He dries the breads below drywall boards, the plaster within the drywall pulling the moisture out of the breads whereas preserving them flat. As soon as the breads are dry, he coats them with shellac and a product referred to as “flexi paint” that just about rubberises the breads, making them much less fragile and simpler to work with.

Using the breads as sculptural supplies and impressed by the “curtains” of sangak seen within the markets of Iran, he hangs them from a easy picket body, backed by netting and carpet, suggesting a flowing textile. The impact is a type of flatbread sanctuary, the place totally different nationalities of bread—and, by extension, totally different peoples—coexist and join, their histories interweaving.

“The phrase for bread in Egypt is aish or ‘life’,” he says. Contemplating bread’s borderline sacrosanct standing, it’s thought-about a sin to throw it out, so Farooq used scraps of leftover bread to supply a sequence of monoprints, coating them with oil-based ink then inserting them on paper. The bread compositions have been then handed by way of a printing press and the bread was eliminated, revealing the print. The fragile, ephemeral patterns resemble fingerprints or stamps—and echo the biennial’s title, Precarious Joys.

Farooq additionally made sculptures of preserved bread: two pagoda-like stacks of round breads and and one among rectangular formed ones he calls a “library”.

Whereas the works themselves are libraries of embedded, imprinted reminiscence, the massive hanging set up can also be a type of different map of Toronto: a metropolis of diasporic neighbourhoods expressed by way of the wonder, the fragility and the very ephemeral nature of the stuff of life.

On 3 November, Farooq has invited all the native bakers he befriended to return to a feast of flatbreads, extending a banquet desk out from the set up and providing up a scrumptious sense of neighborhood.

Sameer Farooq: The Flatbread Library, till 1 December, The Auto BLDG, ninth flooring, Toronto, a part of the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Artwork