Parade

On display Wed-Fri 12NN-5PM & Sat 12NN-4PM
Screening Room in NAC’s Show Room Gallery

Beginning Thursday 14 October
Presented in partnership with V-Tape

Husain deploys condominium sales fly-throughs (CGI promotional videos designed to seduce potential buyers by illustrating dreamy and uncluttered domestic and social scenarios), projecting and re-shooting the images on fluttering fabric to suggest pristine lives lived in elegant and austere boxes in the sky. At times the video is populated by alternately beautiful and creepy computer-enhanced urbanites, composite characters who go from work to shopping to working out to groomed perfection to ground-floor lounge drinks with compatriots, without stepping outside – though they may gaze longingly at the moon through a window or briefly traverse a manicured courtyard. At other times, the video clips resemble an unpeopled video or computer game – Myst, for example – in which the viewer wanders/drives/ skates through architectures and landscapes designed for people but devoid of life. These scenes are at once dystopian and deeply alluring.

– Kathleen Smith

Artist and filmmaker Oliver Husain is based in Toronto, Canada. Husain’s projects often begin with fragment of history, a rumour, a personal encounter or a distant memory. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages and visual pleasures — such as dance, puppetry, costume, special effects — to animate his research and fold the viewers into complex narrative set-ups.