Directing
Using reenactment, journal readings, and speculation, Oliver Husain's multilayered video vibrantly evokes the Indian performer and activist Snehalata Reddy, who was incarcerated in the Bangalore Central Jail in 1976 with no hearing, no charges filed, and no recourse to a court of law during the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi.
Purfled Promises was a work of expanded cinema. Two neo-drag entities entered the cinema and held a screen in front of the auditorium's red curtain on which a video was shown that consisted entirely of zooming shots of veils revealing more veils, increasingly baroque in nature until a voice over addressed the audience directly. As we'd been watching these 'reveals' it told us that what we hadn't noticed was the screen itself which was moving slowly closer towards us. At which point we did notice this and the screen kept on coming, its supporters clambering over the cinema's seats and audience's heads, finally laying it down on top of half a dozen of them who had to struggle out of it as the cinema lights came on.
Finding its narrative inspiration in the 1947 Lana Turner film Green Dolphin Street, this hybrid films follows a Filipino Canadian woman as she recounts her complicated romantic affairs (which may or may not be imagined), while a spatial continuum is opened between her suburban Canadian setting and the bustling streets of Jakarta.
In 2024, a deteriorated 16mm print of a film about Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus dances resurfaced, now awash in vibrant pink from chemical aging. Oliver Husain and collaborators use this flamboyant tint to reimagine the 1925 choreographies.
Referencing a popular fairy tale and a new source of protein, the first IMAX cinema in Indonesia—the Keong Emas Theatre—was built to resemble a golden apple snail. Moving between tiny and monumental, soft and solid, mythical and invasive, this graceful animal is making its slow-paced way through the topography of IMAX cinema itself.
"It’s 1893, and a crowd has gathered on the beach. They’re dressed in frumpy Victorian garb, sporting elaborate hats, fans, and binoculars as they look placidly out over the water. These might be the inhabitants of Isla Santa Maria - that mythic island that is said to have formed from the wreckage of a replica of Christopher Columbus’s ship, and which does not appear on any maps - or maybe they’re just out in their Sunday best, hoping to catch a glimpse of utopia.
