A creative education doesn’t necessarily stop with graduation from art school. Digital/interactive artist Faisal Anwar knows this well; he grew his practice with post-grad residencies at the Canadian Film Centre, the Banff New Media Institute and other institutions.
“My inspiration comes from many different directions,” says Anwar. “A lot of it comes from travelling and meeting amazing people all over the world.”
Anwar grew up in Pakistan, and studied graphic design there at the National College of Arts Lahore. After graduating in 1996, he worked at a software company for a few years before moving to Toronto—a move that opened up a whole new realm of possibilities and opportunities for him.
“When I moved from Pakistan to Toronto, I saw all this diversity living in one space,” he says. “I started asking questions about how we’re interacting with each other, and how we can come to know about each other more.”
Anwar’s questions led him first to the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab, where he did a post-graduate certificate in interactive art and entertainment. Later, he did three residencies at the Banff New Media Institute, which helped him develop various projects.
One of the projects Anwar developed in Banff, Odd Spaces, grew into a Twitter-based interactive artwork at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche and a site-specific installation at Vancouver’s Cultural Olympiad. Furthermore, some of the connections and inspirations he developed at the CFC Media Lab prompted him to launch My City Stories, a website for sharing experiences of local and global community.
Recently, for his developing project Titra, Anwar even created his own self-driven residency at Livid Instruments, a San Francisco technology company.
“What I am communicating varies from project to project,” Anwar says. “My practice is very spontaneous and very organic; it evolves over time. I’m working with new mediums, and if the medium changes, the outcome of the work changes. Sometimes even the question behind it changes.”
Given the rapidly changing environment that Anwar chooses to work in, it’s clear that he’s committed to educating himself through various means—from residencies and self-teaching to collaborating and travelling—for many years to come.
