BIO
Asif Farooq was an artist who lived and worked in his hometown of Miami, Florida. Farooq’s work operates with ideas of impermanence and the existence/nonexistence of truth.
Farooq saw paper as a material that has a birth, life, and death, just like the human condition. The transience of the material, and the objects he choose to create out of it, serves as a temporary memorial that, in effect, embody an observation of time and the human emotions that develop within its confines. The precision and detail of each paper gun parallels the emotional weight of its functional counterpart.
His most ambitious project to date, Balalaika, is a full-scale paper replica of a Soviet era MiG-21 fighter jet. Asif’s Balalaika invites onlookers to explore their own thoughts and narratives concerning current geo-political realities, and consider the impact that the Cold War has had on America’s international relations with ex-soviet nations to this day. Although Farooq leaves his own political views out of his work, it begs the question, are we viewing our own history through the rose colored lens of American nationalism?
