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

Sameer Farooq’s sublime work The Flatbread Library, a highlight of this year’s Toronto Biennial of Art (until 1 December), was 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 Ugandan Ismaili mother a midwife—was staying in the mountainous region of Peshawar bordering Afghanistan with his aunt. A trip to the local tandoor, a community bakery common in South Asia where locals take their bread to be baked, proved revelatory.

“I was really inspired sculpturally by all the different types of bread there,” Farooq tells The Art Newspaper. “They had different textures and stamps denoting specific bakeries and each bakery had its own pattern or motif imprinted on the bread.”

He explains that bakers will buy bread stamps from woodworkers in the market to put patterns on the bread and make other markings and indentations with their fingers to denote a kind of signature. Often, they will place bread on carpets hanging from hooks, or they will lay it flat on rugs on the ground as a kind of display.

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

“My dad always says that bread is like the newspaper,” he says. “When the baker delivers bread door to door, he or she also spreads the news and the gossip of the community.”

He also learned that flatbread enjoys a kind of universality, transcending borders and identities like the Sufi traveller of the food world—something that Farooq identified with personally. He sees flatbreads as repositories of “embedded memory” both collective and historical.

Informed by his practice of critically reading and reimagining museum narrative strategies, the flatbread story soon 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 held community gatherings around the ovens where flatbread was baked and shared.

He also began to focus on the flatbread as an art material, preparing a show at Le 19 CRAC, a cultural centre in the French Alpine town of Montbeliard near the Swiss border in the winter of 2023. That was a “maquette” for his Toronto Biennial project, he says.

With joint funding from the Toronto Biennial and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University, where he was an artist-in-residence earlier this year, he began researching the many diasporic bakeries in the Greater Toronto Area that used tandoors or other kinds of community ovens to make flatbread. These ranged from Armenian, Indian and Mexican to Afghan, Iranian, Pakistani, Lebanese and other flatbread traditions. He also met a Gazan mother and her daughter who had their own traditional clay oven on their porch where they made Palestinian taboon. Farooq prepared a special booklet featuring interviews with the women about the connection between their bread, their history and ancestral memories of food.

All of these breads are described in detail in a special publication accompanying his Toronto Biennial exhibition, describing the delicate lavash from Iran, Armenia and Turkey, the Indian naan and roti, and the Mexican tortilla—each with its own unique design, texture and flavour.

Drawing on his background as a ceramicist, Farooq uses a technique employed in making clay tiles. He dries the breads under drywall boards, the plaster in the drywall pulling the moisture out of the breads while keeping them flat. Once the breads are dry, he coats them with shellac and a product called “flexi paint” that almost rubberises the breads, making them less fragile and easier to work with.

Employing the breads as sculptural materials and inspired by the “curtains” of sangak seen in the markets of Iran, he hangs them from a simple wooden frame, backed by netting and carpet, suggesting a flowing textile. The effect is a kind of flatbread sanctuary, where different nationalities of bread—and, by extension, different peoples—coexist and connect, their histories interweaving.

“The word for bread in Egypt is aish or ‘life’,” he says. Considering bread’s borderline sacrosanct status, it’s considered a sin to throw it out, so Farooq used scraps of leftover bread to produce a series of monoprints, coating them with oil-based ink then placing them on paper. The bread compositions were then passed through a printing press and the bread was removed, revealing the print. The delicate, ephemeral patterns resemble fingerprints or stamps—and echo the biennial’s title, Precarious Joys.

Exhibitions

Toronto Biennial spotlights 36 artists—from international stars to emerging Canadian talents—at venues across the city

Larry Humber

Farooq also made sculptures of preserved bread: two pagoda-like stacks of circular breads and and one of rectangular shaped ones he calls a “library”.

While the works themselves are libraries of embedded, imprinted memory, the large hanging installation is also a kind of alternative map of Toronto: a city of diasporic neighbourhoods expressed through the beauty, the fragility and the very ephemeral nature of the staff of life.

On 3 November, Farooq has invited all of the local bakers he befriended to come to a feast of flatbreads, extending a banquet table out from the installation and offering up a delicious sense of community.

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