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USA: Oye! Times readers Get FREE $30 to spend on Amazon, Walmart…Dates: May 2, 2013 to June 8, 2013
Location: Susan Hobbs Gallery
Husains second exhibition at the gallery, titled Gebimsel, is organized around a theme particularly relevant to the shifting cityscapes of many urban centers: condominium living. Gebimsel is a German term that refers to dangling decorations, from garlands to beaded curtains, found in the home. Likewise, his assembly of anti-architectural structures, drawings, and silk paintings take cues from condominium showroom decoritems meant to give an empty architecture the impression of lived-in-ness, and more importantly, a lifestyle to buy into. A montage of primarily found video footage of condominium fly throughs (virtual 3D videos of proposed developments) follows Marguerite Durass concept of the image passe-partout, which describes a blank image open enough to accept an indefinite number of texts. In Husains video, as we float through these various constructed spaces, the screen is populated (or accessorized) with dialogue inserted as chat bubbles. The video is an extension of Husains earlier videos Q (2002), Swivel, and Shrivel (both 2005), which depict digitized versions of everyday life in the city, but here he presents a more pointed meditation on gentrification. The condo showroom, as a real-life venue or modeled in CGI, is the post-modern image passe-partout, and allows us to composite our own fantasy of day-to-day living into it. Accompanying the show is a custom poster depicting a box of Indonesian pandan leaf-flavoured cake mix paired with the intermittent playing of German popstar Alexandras 1968 schlager Illusionen. The incongruent collision of these two elements within Husains mock showroom emphasizes the melancholic air of his critique, yet they evoke the optimism of the 1960s as a comparison to the present. The promises of high rise construction then seem to have shifted now, especially in Toronto. As Husain writes, Its not that the leading critics of urbanism, like Richard Sennet and Jane Jacobs, are irrelevant now, but thinking about urban development in those terms doesn\’t apply any more now that we\’re surrounded by glass walls as given facts.
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