How does one locate and navigate their own self in a globalised world that welcomes commodity exchange, but limits movement of people? Where scares around refugee crisis are now front-page news, yet hybrid identities through our multiple places of belonging are now increasingly visible.

Salman Toor grapples with precisely these issues based on his experience of dislocation and belonging. He is perhaps best placed to handle this monumental task — brought up in Lahore, trained in the US, and now part of the cosmopolitan art milieu in New York, the global city where all cultures meld and come together. He is part of an increasingly relevant group of artists, writers and thinkers who deal with the anxious reality of finding themselves in luminal spaces, belonging here, nor there, in a world that demands more and more binaries.

In this second solo exhibition at New York’s Aicon Gallery, titled “Resident Alien” Toor’s work takes on a monumental value. The scale is panoramic, the stories vast, punctuated with moments that draw the viewer in. The work is whole yet individual, with each figure its own story, its own unit. In ‘Jetsetter’ an individual is forlornly submitting his passport to the border control staff — queued behind are individuals who seem of a different belonging, a different economic and social classes, multiplying rapidly and quickly anonymous. Their stories are untold, their voices unheard, but in global travel their experience is all the same.

Salman Toor tackles complex issues of global identity and history in this show

There is an autobiographical element, linked to Toor’s previous practice, but the sheer vastness of topics covered is an ambitious attempt to fashion stories and narratives for the viewer to be absorbed in. Like his previous work, there is a particular focus on the individual amongst the crowd and the viewer observes historically and socially diverse people. However, there is a sense of haziness and surrealism in the work. Figures come to us mediated through dreams, in ghostly fashion. The background and landscape is dream-like, with structures melding into the sky, and Urdu poetry, inaccessible to a Western audience, a central element.

‘Rooftop party with ghosts’ is another ambitious work. Eighteen feet in length, the work demands that the viewer walk along it to observe a fluid storyline, depicting characters that emerge from history and the present, melded together in a cosmopolitan salad bowl. Among this globalised young audiences are ‘ghosts’ of figures past, one sees a wandering Sufi in a ghost-like apparition, or a traveller, so that the lines between reality and imagination are blurred. The heavy baggage of culture, of representation and of historical reality sticks is a way to understand the heavy symbolism present. Toor, always attuned and heavily engaged with the Western art history from the Renaissance and the Baroque era, this time seems to draw links with German modernist painting, such as George Grosz. The works are distorted and the strokes quick.

The vastness of Toor’s large complicated works is in contrast to his smaller studies of figures. His ‘Newscaster’ series is a comical, ironic look at the politics of media depiction, the Fourth Estate, so powerful today in depicting nations and histories, and shaping narratives, through stereotypical depictions of the female newscasters who bring accounts of distant lands that are scary and full of war and conflict — shaping global policy and conflict.

Toor’s practice, always in dialogue with his experience and surrounding tackles complex issues of global identity and history for perhaps the first time. In doing so, the artist breaks free from issues of the local / global and imagines larger possibilities for not just the world, but for his own practice.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, December 20th, 2015