I first met Sameer Farooq through a mutual friend at my previous studio on Spadina Avenue back in 2018. I feel that my journey as an artist and as an adult, has been greatly informed by his work, as well as by his kindness. He is one of Canada’s finest mid-career contemporary artists, working across many media, including documentary film, printmaking, installation, graphic design, and ceramics.
Sameer’s work explores cultural institutions such as galleries, museums, and archives. Where society often assumes these seemingly benign institutions are neutral or objective, his art challenges that notion, unpacking the complicated and often troubling histories embedded within them.
The first project I helped him make was his 2017 exhibition Pouf, Sausage, Weight, Arc at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. For this exhibition, Sameer replicated the tools and props used by museum conservators to care for and transport delicate objects, but rendered them in ceramic. With the help of artist Kelly Rae Adams, he cast balloons in plaster; once the two-part molds were complete, we slip-cast the resulting “sandbags.” He continued to replicate museum packaging materials in ceramic throughout the show.
There is something deeply poetic about this gesture: recreating the insignificant packing materials used to cushion priceless artifacts, but presenting them without the artifacts themselves. Just the packaging, carefully reproduced in an exquisite and fragile material.
The Fairest Order in the World by Sameer Farooq (2023)
In the midst of the global pandemic, I had the opportunity to work with Sameer again, this time at Clay Space. His 2021 exhibition A Heap of Random Sweepings was a collaboration with musician Gabie Strong and poet Jared Stanley. The exhibition unfolded as a series of stations within the gallery, where visitors could read Jared’s poems, encounter Sameer’s sculptures, and hear Gabie’s soundtrack playing overhead.
At Clay Space, we helped Sameer replicate goblets and vases he had seen at the museum in Taxila, Pakistan. After throwing the forms, they were cast in plaster—but this time, it was the plaster negatives that Sameer chose to exhibit. The casting process was assisted by our friend, the very talented Ante Kurilić. As with the works at the Aga Khan in 2018, these large plaster sculptures emphasized absence: the void left by the artifact rather than the object itself.
Since 2021, this exhibition has continued to evolve and has toured institutions including the Dalhousie Art Gallery, the McMaster Museum of Art, and the Musée d’Art de Joliette. It will continue to the Varley Art Gallery and the MacKenzie Art Gallery under the expanded title The Fairest Order in the World.
There are two additional projects of Sameer’s that I would like to highlight. The first is his 2019 collaboration with the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Ontario, where he invited children from the community to raid and take home what was once Canada’s largest collection of dolls. The second is his long-running engagement with bread-making between 2020 and 2024.
In 2020, outside the Scarborough Museum, Sameer built a tandoor oven for the local community. In 2024, as part of the Toronto Biennial of Art, he preserved a variety of flatbreads in shellac and constructed a monumental sculpture from them. What made both projects so powerful was the way he reimagined community engagement, positioning the museum not as a static authority but as a flexible, living, and participatory space.
Flatbread Library by Sameer Farooq (2024)
In 2025, Sammer completed his Arts/Industry Ceramics Residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Sculptural installation, Vitreous China with stain and physical vapor deposition, mandarin oranges, artificial flowers, beeswax candles, Cream City brick, aluminum pipe. A portion of this work in the collection of the John Michael Kohler Art Center. Photography courtesy of John Michael Kohler Art Center.
About the artist
Born on Cape Breton Island in 1978, Sameer is of half Pakistani and Ugandan Indian descent (not coincidentally the same mix as Zoran Mandani). His education includes an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (Providence, RI), a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam, NL), and a BA from McGill University (Montreal, QC). He has held numerous exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2023), Fonderie Darling in Montréal (2022), and the British Library in London (2015), among many others. Most recently, he completed his 2025 Arts/Industry Ceramics Residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
