Oliver Husain’s productions often begin with a portrait of a person or place, mixing a wide range of cinematic languages and visual codes, dance, puppetry, and animation, which disassemble and subvert fixed readings of the original material in new theatricalized forms. Welcome to our social cabaret on the border between installation and performance. Here you will experience Oliver Husain’s exhibition Hovering Proxies, where a new installation forms the backdrop for a new film filmed inside the exhibition for the exhibition. With both these elements on display simultaneously, the viewer penetrates a thin veneer to become a performer on the exhibition’s stage — indeed only half way through the exhibition do you become aware you have replaced the hovering proxies.
Program Notes:

“Instead of the winter at York University, you are surrounded by the late summer in Tandun’s garden in downtown Jakarta (my favorite city). The two dogs, Ziggy and Uma, scuffle on the dry grass, Ziggy, the husky, is a bit crazy from the heat. Elegant wrought iron furniture balancing on thin legs, withered vines, broken flowerpots: this is the set for a tropical drama. But you are invited to step behind the flapping curtain, where you might find yourself in the position of an understudy, waiting for the star’s fatal slip… As always, the really exciting part happens backstage. (Backstage drama, my favorite genre.) Or rather, the really exciting part is that one step through the curtain, that thin in-between space, that slice of a moment. That’s the step with potential! ” – Oliver Husain

Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Oliver Husain currently lives and works in Toronto. In 2008, he was a featured filmmaker at the Flaherty Film Seminar, Colgate, New York. In fall 2009, his film Mount Shasta screened at the London Film Festival, Impakt (Utrecht), EXiS Experimental Film and Video Festival (Seoul), and Experimenta (Bangalore), and his new film-performance Purfled Promises was presented at Live Film! Jack Smith! Festival, Berlin.