Green: Salman Toor and South Asian Literary Production In Detail

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.