Faisal Anwar: CharBagh

CharBagh illuminates the west façade of Chuck Bailey Recreation Centre with ornate geometric patterns. Modelled on the traditional grid compositions of Persian gardens, each pattern grows and shifts in response to data generated on social media and collected by the artist.

Anwar’s project encourages the public to meaningfully participate in online conversation in order to empower social change. CharBagh’s presence at UrbanScreen is an extension of its simultaneous installation in Surrey Art Gallery's exhibition Garden in the Machine. CharBagh grows out of the artist's workshops with community groups discussing themes related to sustainable food production, climate change, and peoples' changing relationships with nature.

About the Artist

Faisal Anwar is an artist, creative technologist, and interaction designer based in Canada. Anwar has a keen interest in exploring sociopolitical spaces and patterns in ecologies that intrigue the mind through multilayered participatory experiences. His work is often interactive and uses public data and engagement to question how rights-of-access is blurring lines between private and public spaces to form a new territory.

Anwar's project I see my streets, presented at the 2017 Karachi Biennale, investigated a relationship between the spatio-temporal dimensions of cities and our Neo-Tech mind-sets. Another work, En(Light), 2017, is a large-scale outdoor responsive sculpture with dynamically-controlled LED lights responsive to time, temperature, changes in weather patterns, and audience engagement.

Anwar is a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre's Habitat-LAB Interactive Arts and Entertainment Program in 2004. He completed his Bachelors in Graphic Design from the National College of Arts in Pakistan 1996. His media installations have been exhibited across Canada and the world.

Curator: Jordan Strom
Origin of Exhibition: Surrey Art Gallery