Ismail FAROUK (b. 1973)
Sometimes a Fire I
2006
digital photography and light jet printing
61 x 78 cm
Sometimes a Fire II
2006
digital photography and light jet printing
61 x 78 cm
Sometimes a Fire III
2006
digital photography and light jet printing
61 x 78 cm
Sometimes a Fire IV
2006
digital photography and light jet printing
61 x 78 cm
BIOGRAPHY
Ismail Farouk is a multidisciplinary artist, an urban geographer, and Director of Art For Humanity at Durban University of Technology.
In his practice, he focuses on developing creative responses to racial hatred, social injustice and ghettoization. Interrogating intersecting modalities and technologies of power that reproduce colonial legacies in the everyday, Farouk works towards carving out spaces for playing with, looking at, discussing, speaking alongside/performing alternative and hidden archives. Grounded in spatial practices and the visual, memory and the embodied, he is interested in ways to unsettle and undiscipline our relationships and attachments to colonial land relations, mappings and architectures of power.
His work has featured in various publications, platforms and exhibitions globally. Exhibitions include: Afropolis (Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2010); Urban Concerns (Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2008); ZA: Young Art from South Africa (Palazzo delle Papesse, Sienna, Italy, 2008; Apartheid: The South African Mirror (CCCB, Barcelona, 2007). In 2008, he was a fellow at the MAK Centre for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, which gave rise to the exhibit Cancelled Without Prejudice (2008–2009). Farouk was the first recipient of the Sylt Quelle Cultural Award for Southern Africa (2008), presented by the Goethe Institut, South Africa.