Ismail Farouk is a multidisciplinary artist who currently works with the tools of film and food-growing, experimenting with rekindling relationships and networks with plants, animals, and ecosystems we as humans are embedded in and supported by. Having handed in their PhD in food-based artistic practices, and as an artist deeply invested in urban and spatial inequalities, Farouk explores how these intersect with colonial and apartheid histories. Through their arts-based research practice, Farouk investigates how food and land-based art can unsettle colonial ways of being in the world and enact or imagine speculative futures of abundance.
Farouk is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Durban University of Technology and the Director of Art For Humanity, based in Durban, South Africa. Their work has been featured in various collections, publications, platforms, and exhibitions globally. By interrogating intersecting modalities and technologies of power that reproduce colonial legacies in the everyday, Farouk works towards carving out spaces to explore, discuss, and perform alternative and hidden archives