Ismail Farouk, PhD, is a multidisciplinary artist whose work interrogates intersecting modalities and technologies of power that reify and reproduce colonial legacies in the everyday. Working with forms of interruption and reimagining, Farouk’s work moves towards presents and futures of social and spatial justice, care and recalibration of human/more than human relations. Carving out spaces for coming together, communing, collaborating, playing with, looking at, discussing, speaking alongside and performing alternative and hidden archives, Farouk sees creative practice as portals and social experiments with the ineffable.
Whether thinking about layers of erased and mistold histories in the city of Durban, or the complex legacies of apartheid spatial planning in the cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town, or collaboratively working on construction of visual and tactile counter maps of the US/Mexico border that show the interruptions of the border wall caused by seasonal flooding,
Through walks, embodiment, land-based practices that include foraging, growing food, cooking and thinking about the edible and the eaten, Farouk’s practice is grounded in spatial histories, memory, land relations and the embodied.
As an artist, educator, curator and scholar, Farouk imagines the arts as an unruly space where we can test the possibilities for unsettling and undiscipline attachments to colonial land relations, mappings and architectures of power, working with space, food, seed, map, border, archive as active sites of contestation and refusal.
Farouk’s work spans audiovisual practices, live art, photography, installation, social practice and increasingly is situated within longer trajectories of land-based practices. Farouk’s work has featured in various local and international collections, publications, platforms and exhibitions.