Sameer Farooq: The Fairest Order in the World
Students and faculty from Dalhousie's Creative Writing Program will be lead attendees through a series of meditative creative writing prompts that engage with Sameer Farooq's exhibition "The Fairest Order in the World," and the questions the works prompt regarding our relationships to objects, collections, belonging, and possession.
In this first exhibition in his home province of Nova Scotia, Cape Breton born, Toronto based artist Sameer Farooq presents a new installation that offers a deeply poetic space to reflect on the fraught and violent histories of art and anthropological museums, their colonial origins, structures, and impulses.
With "The Fairest Order in the World," Farooq probes notions of provenance, repatriation, and repair, composing a series of new and recent sculptures and images to articulate unique ideas for repurposing the emptied spaces of museums devoid of their spoils. Mining the possibilities offered by sustained engagement, Farooq invites us to envision what the museum might become through the mechanics of restitution, what it may shift to collect and document, and what kind of experiences it could nurture.
The exhibition takes its title from a text fragment of Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus: "The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings." Contained in this duality of opposites is the idea that the most organized and just attempt at a universal order is equally as flawed or filled with balance and beauty as an arbitrary pile of refuse. Considering this paradox, Farooq's meticulously choreographed assembly invites us to interrogate our relationship with art objects and museum displays, as well as the ordering narratives they uphold.
Dalhousie Art Gallery will be open extended hours October 14 from 6PM to midnight for Nocturne 2023.
Image: Sameer Farooq, I opened up the radio but there was no-one inside (2022).
Photographer: Toni Hafkenscheid.
