Introduction

Salman Toor: My name is Salman Toor and I'm from Pakistan. I am a figurative painter. I had done a painting called Dancing to Whitney about two years ago. I was imagining that the characters in the painting were dancing to this song, "How Will I Know?" When we decided to do this show, we took this title because, not only was it a song that I really like dancing to, but it also had a deeper resonance, thinking about the future.

Narrator: Toor lives and works in New York City, but many of his paintings depict in-between settings.

Salman Toor: There's a lot of dancing in a lot of my paintings. I moved from a conservative place into this ultra-free, urban culture here. So the paintings also move between being fantasies of free space and more constricted, inner spaces that people inhabit when maybe they're crossing national borders and they’re forced to reckon with a reduction of what their identity might mean to a gatekeeper who might have to decide whether these individuals should be allowed to cross or not. And I think they're also ultimately linked to my idea of myself.