Sameer Farooqthe sublime work of The Flatbread Librarya highlight of this year’s Toronto Art Biennale (until December 1), is inspired by the artist’s 2019 visit to Pakistan with his father.

Farooq – who grew up in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, where his Pakistani father was a doctor and his Ugandan Ismaili mother a midwife – lived in the mountainous Peshawar region, bordering Afghanistan, with his aunt. A trip to the local tandoora common community bakery in South Asia where locals bring their bread to be baked, proved revealing.

“I was really inspired sculpturally by all the different types of bread there,” says Farooq. The arts journal“They had different textures and stamps denoting specific bakeries and each bakery had its own pattern or design printed on the bread.”

He explains that bakers buy bread stamps from carpenters in the market to put designs on the bread and make other markings and impressions with their fingers to designate a sort of signature. They often place the bread on mats hanging from hooks, or lay it flat on mats on the floor as a sort of display.

It was a eureka moment for the Toronto-based artist, where he reimagined flatbread as a kind of textile, which he weaves into his installation with grace and ingenuity. It was also the beginning of years of research on tandoors which took the artist to Turkey, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Morocco and Mexico. He discovers that everywhere, these ovens are vehicles for community building.

“My father always says that bread is like newspaper,” he says. “When the baker delivers bread to homes, he also spreads community news and gossip. »

He also learned that flatbread enjoys a kind of universality, transcending borders and identities like the Sufi traveler of the food world – something Farooq personally identified with. He considers flatbreads to be repositories of “integrated memory” that is both collective and historical.

Influenced by his practice of critical reading and reimagining of museum narrative strategies, the story of flatbread quickly became an obsession. In 2020, Farooq built a tandoor oven installation at the Scarborough Museum, and in February 2023, another at the Materia Abiertaschool in Mexico City. In both cases, he organized community gatherings around the ovens where flatbread was baked and shared.

He has also begun to focus on flatbread as an art material, preparing an exhibition at 19 CRAC, a cultural center in the French Alpine town of Montbéliard, near the Swiss border, in winter 2023. was a “model” for his Toronto project. Two-year project, he said.

With joint funding from the Toronto Biennale and the Agnes Etherington Art Center at Queen’s University, where he was artist in residence earlier this year, he began researching the many diasporic bakeries in the Greater Toronto Area who used tandoors or other types of communities. ovens for making flatbread. These ranged from Armenian, Indian and Mexican traditions to Afghan, Iranian, Pakistani, Lebanese and other traditions. He also met a mother from Gaza and her daughter who had their own traditional clay oven on their porch where they prepared Palestinian products. taboo. Farooq has prepared a special booklet containing interviews with the women about the connection between their bread, their history and their ancestral memories of the food.

All of these breads are described in detail in a special publication accompanying its exhibition at the Toronto Biennale, describing the delicate lavash from Iran, Armenia and Turkey, the Indians naan And roastand the Mexican tortilla—each with its own unique design, texture and flavor.

Drawing on his experience as a ceramist, Farooq uses a technique used in making clay tiles. It dries loaves under plasterboard, with the plaster in the plasterboard removing moisture from the loaves while keeping them flat. Once the loaves are dry, he coats them with shellac and a product called “flexi paint” which almost rubberizes the loaves, making them less fragile and easier to work with.

Using breads as sculptural materials and taking inspiration from the “curtains” of Sangak seen in markets in Iran, he hangs them from a simple wooden frame, supported by netting and carpet, suggesting a fluid textile. The effect is a kind of flatbread sanctuary, where different bread nationalities – and, by extension, different peoples – coexist and connect, their histories intertwined.

“The word for bread in Egypt is aish or “life”,” he says. Given the sacrosanct status of bread, throwing it away is considered a sin. So Farooq used leftover bread to produce a series of monoprints, coating them with oil-based ink and then placing them on paper. The bread compositions were then put through a printing press and the bread was removed, revealing the print. The delicate and ephemeral patterns resemble fingerprints or stamps and echo the title of the biennial, Precarious joys.

Farooq has also made sculptures of preserved bread: two circular stacks of bread in the shape of a pagoda and one in a rectangular shape which he calls a “library”.

If the works themselves are libraries of integrated and printed memory, the large suspended installation is also a kind of alternative map of Toronto: a city of diasporic neighborhoods expressed through the beauty, fragility and very ephemeral nature of the elements of the life.

On November 3, Farooq invited all the local bakers he befriended to a flatbread feast, extending a banquet table outside the facility and providing a delicious sense of community.

• Sameer Farooq: The Flatbread Libraryuntil December 1, The Auto BLDG, ninth floor, Toronto, as part of the 2024 Toronto Art Biennial