Coinciding with Salman Toor: Someone Like You (The Courtauld Gallery, 2 October 2026 – 10 January 2027), Toor’s first solo museum show in Europe, the 2026/2027 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series invites an international roster of academics, curators, conservators and practitioners to reflect on materiality, identity, storytelling, and politics in the art of the South Asian diaspora.
Our first event of the series will explore the cultural significance of motifs and symbols of South Asia in Toor’s work, specifically tracing the colour green and South Asian literary production, through two presentations and an in conversation.
Another Green World – Evan Moffitt
This talk will trace the colour green and its chemical substrates from Toor’s lush, nocturnal palette backwards through time, in order to ask what the artist harvests from the history of painting and how, with his materials as well as his processes, he seeds it anew.
Contextualising Salman in a history of Queer South Asian art and literary production – Aziz Sohail
This lecture-presentation by Aziz Sohail grounds Salman Toor’s oeuvre in the evolving language of South Asian cultural production – including art, literature and music. Artists such as Anwar Saeed, Bhupen Khakhar, Sunil Gupta and Chitra Ganesh have long searched for the visual vocabulary of production – what relations across space and time may we imagine, in order to read Toor’s and influences with nuance? Toor’s practice evokes multiple worlds – and borrows and contributes from musical, literary and filmic forms. This could be a qawwali mehfil, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, or the film Joyland.
In presenting Toor’s work within these multi-varied forms and their cosmopolitan lives, Sohail places their practice firmly in many genealogies and networks of community and friendship that span borders, and cosmological worlds.
Organised by Elena Crippa (Senior Curator of Contemporary Art) and Leyla Arrianne Bumbra (Head of Research Forum) at The Courtauld.
Speakers:
Evan Moffitt is a writer, editor, and critic. He is currently Senior Digital Editor at The Observer. His writing appears in The Guardian, The New York Times, Financial Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art Review, Aperture, Architectural Digest, and 4 Columns, among other publications. He has held editorial roles at several magazines, including Digital Editor at BUTT and Senior Editor at Frieze.
Moffitt has co-authored books on numerous artists, including Hélio Oiticica, Jack Pierson, Nathalie Djurberg, Florian Krewer, Salman Toor, and Barbara Wagner, and spoken at a range of academic and cultural institutions, such as Centre Pompidou, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, the Morgan Library, the International Center for Photography, and New York University. He holds a BA in Art History from UCLA and a MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths University. He lives in London.
Aziz Sohail is a Pakistan-passport holding curator and writer whose work builds interdisciplinary connections between art, history, archives, literature, theory, and biography and supports new cultural and pedagogical infrastructures. Their research and resultant projects honour and recognise the power of queer and feminist collectivity, sociability, joy, and wayward encounter and unfold through slowness, collaboration, and tentacularity.
