Part of Fall 2006
Ranging from music videos to 3D animation to live-action compositing to Bollywood dance sequences and sometimes all at once Oliver Husain’s short videos have everything except that stifling sense of seriousness that so often seems to come with rigour.
Shot in locations the world over (including Germany, India, Indonesia, and China), these works are playful travelogues from some place that has never existed except as the impossible sum of various parts. They combine a keen, respectful sense of place (Swivel’s 10,000-degree pan sews various views of Shanghai into a single seamless panorama) with a healthily absurd irreverence (Shrivel busts Jakarta into a composite fantasia of Cartesian planes and hair-pulling melodramas) that puts the fab back in fabulist.
This evening will also include a short preview of Husain’s work-in-progress Back Alley Scroll, presented in the form of a live puppet show. Keywords: mud architecture traditional building techniques art vs. activism windmills suburbia hysteria bad hair Indonesian mystery soap glitter decorations flower bouquets ball breaking through the facade Flamenco dancer graffiti.
Co-presented with the Goethe-Institut Toronto.
Programme:
Shasta Fumes, live puppet show / 10min / Music by Mantler!!
Ron & Leo, 13:00, 1999
Ron and Leo are twins, lovers, a boyband and plushy toys. They go through the phases of a popstar-crisis: Sell-Out, discontent, fighting at the press conference, etc., shown as a musical melodrama.
Q, 15:00, 2002
The audience is passed through an adorned event course. Queing up is been made easy by the staff, taking care of seamless entertainment. (Best German Short Film Award Gold, 2003)
Dettifoss, 6:00, 2001Weariness in a mansion overhanging the Dettifoss, Europe’s largest waterfall.
FuZe, 3:45, 2004
Fading Murals around the pedestrian zone of Halle, a city in east Germany, in a choreography with passers-by.
intermission
Swivel, 15:10, 2003-05
The camera swivels around itself and through new Shanghai, passing from the suburbs into the city and back.
Shrivel, 8:20, 2005
Compositing panoramic views of a highly stylized residential area near Jakarta with iconic scenes of a globalized lifestyle.
Squiggle, 21:40, 2005
when the sun lifts itself
soundless or smacking,
from the slick horizon,
a drop falls from the zinc tap into the bucket
when the dew on the grass is grey,
the earth is red
