Salman Toor

Are You Here?
Oil on pane, variable dimensions, 2017

Salman Toor (b. 1983) lives and works between New York and Lahore.
This project combines painting, collage and installation, connecting Lahore to New York City. The forms in the work aim to create an interface between seemingly divergent understandings of an over-connected world, developing societies like Lahore and the microcosms of cultures like Brooklyn’s art scene where the artist lives and works. The stories in the paintings and text highlight issues of assimilation and resistance to the cultural rhythms of both cities.
The re-arrangable wall collage is imagined by the artist to point to notions of adaptation in both cities as well as a fluid sense of self, moving between text and image, the sacred, the mundane, and the profane.
The ‘Boom’ panels act as thought bubbles and sudden revelations as seen in exclamations of advertisement marking sales on signs and billboards and hand-painted signs all over Lahore and New York City. The text includes random diary entries in (legible and illegible) English as well as Persio-Arabic gibberish, memories of graffiti dribbled in alleyways and mosques, calligraphic protest banners and shop signs in Lahore and New York City