SALMAN TOORAWA
Mohammad Salman Toorawa discovered photography in 2009. A self-taught photographer, he embraces minimalism as a means to revive and strengthen his commitment to his religion, Islam. In his work, Salman attempts to deconstruct colonial and oriental discourse by departing from normative ways of using art to demonstrate the culture of a specific community. Instead, he uses the shapes and movements that he sees in nature to convey messages about how our society is changing. By manipulating the silhouettes and the movement of his subject(s) with subtlety and poetry, and imbuing them with a sense of the surreal, Salman appeals to us to preserve the nature that he sees slowly dying. Based on Homi Bhabha’s notion of “liminal space”, the artist appears to suggest that the space in the photographs represents an “interstitial passage between fixed identifications [that] opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy”. Interestingly, in both locations, there is one bird is trying to move away from the flock, in a nod to the idea of migration, displacement and the embracing of new cultures.