On a visit to Pakistan, Sameer Farooq found inspiration for his celebrated Flatbread Library at the local tandoor, a community bakery common in South Asia where people take their bread to be baked.

“I was really inspired sculpturally by all the different types of bread there,” Farooq said in an interview during the Toronto Biennial of Art, where the installation was heralded. “They had different textures and stamps denoting specific bakeries and each bakery had its own pattern or motif imprinted on the bread.”

Farooq sourced a variety of flatbreads from diverse bakeries across the Greater Toronto Region, and used them as sculptural materials across the surface of a large curtain-like form, with a map of their origins.

Farooq talks in this SoundCloud clip about the project as a whole and how it confirmed that “bakers are some of our best sculptors.” (audio link here)

Like curtains of sangak

A multidisciplinary artist, Farooq used techniques from his background in ceramics to solve the sculptural challenges of the work, designed to evoke the “curtains of sangak” hung on nails in doorways of markets in Iran and Azerbaijan. He successfully presented the “hard, flat components in a manner suggestive of a soft, flowing textile form.” (See the full project described on Farooq’s Flatbread site, here)

Years of research into tandoors – and how the ovens are vehicles for building community – was the basis for his installation. The work is part of a long-term project commissioned in collaboration with the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston), examining the political significance and social role of the tandoor.

Part of the reason for the popularity of the installation was that visitors were encouraged to tell their own bread stories and sample some of the breads (above). Farooq called the experience “a joyous, carb-filled journey around the world.”

He also created new monoprint works made by inking flatbreads and running them through a press. These were used in the Toronto Biennial’s Mobile Arts Curriculum, including an extensive set of learning tools (below, and more here).

Sameer Farooq (b. 1978) is a Toronto-based artist of Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent. Working across photography, film, sculpture, and anthropological methods, he investigates how to expand the ways through which museums have looked at the past.

Sameer Farooq’s exhibitions include 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 (2011). He is an alumni of the prestigious Bemis Center Residency and has been longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2024, 2019, 2018 and 2017).

Sameer Farooq’s website, here.

His Instagram, here.

At the Toronto Biennial of Art, here.

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On a personal note . . .

This project underscored for me, at a critical moment in our country’s history, the wonderful multicultural makeup of the region where I live and of Canada as a whole. Sameer Farooq’s exquisite demonstration of who we are is one of the many ways we celebrate ourselves.

Canada is not a “melting pot” but a vibrant cultural mosaic of origins and languages that each contribute to our national identity. We should celebrate the many things that differentiate us, especially our diversity.

-J Walters, The Canadian Art Junkie, 2025