In collaboration with Mirjam Linschooten
Blackwood Gallery, Toronto. Installation of tinted vitrines, animal bones, motion sensor lights, carpet, foam, and text
Curated by: Christine Shaw
The sorrow is in the curtains, the distress is in the vitrine, the pain is in the carpet and on the labels and the shelves, the authority is on the walls. For their exhibition at Blackwood Gallery, Sameer Farooq and Mirjam Linschooten take the ethnographic museum as a subject, exaggerating its repeated forms and revealing the “blueprints of distress” of its makers (to borrow from anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler). In Farooq and Linschooten’s treatment of museum display as an aesthetic medium, a complex space of social codes, ideological agendas, and haphazard protocols emerge from the glass. Proposing alternative models of display, this site-specific installation reflects on the ways by which cultural artifacts can be transformed into public knowledge, all the while recognizing that the fingerprints of the institution will always be on the material.
Installation view at the Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Installation view at the Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Vitrines appear as black monuments with the lights not engaged. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Installation view at the Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Vitrines with motion sensor lights engaged. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Installation view at the Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Carpet work based on this skin colour pocket guide developed by anthropologist Paul Broca c.1865.
Single vitrine with interior pyramidal structure. Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Single vitrine with interior pyramidal structure. Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Vitrine detail. Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Vitrine detail. Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Poetry detail. Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Resource table including research compendium and video. Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
Opening at the Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Photo: Mike Dopsa
Opening at the Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2015. Photo: Mike Dopsa
