Oliver Husain is an artist and filmmaker based in Toronto. His exhibitions and films combine elements of cinema and performance, drawing on a range of objects, stories, and materials to create lush, curious environments that denaturalize architectures and histories alike. I first wrote about Husain’s work in a 2016 review of an exhibition of his film Isla Santa Maria 3D at Gallery TPW in Toronto. Then, as now, I was mesmerized by the way Husain kaleidoscopically interrogates his subjects. I spoke with him this summer over Zoom while we were both in Germany (him in Berlin and me in Essen) about several of his recent projects, including DNCB, a collaboration with Kerstin Schroedinger which explores the communal history of Dinitrochlorobenzene (DNCB)—a highly toxic chemical used in both colour film processing and alternative treatments for individuals living with AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s—and Streamy Windows, a collaborative experiment in producing for live streaming. In our conversation about these projects, we talk about the relationship between gossip and history, activist education and video art, and how streaming platforms have transformed the relationship between producers and creators, among other subjects. Throughout, Husain articulates a formative commitment to the idea of exchange, talking about how conversation provides the spark that begins many of his creative investigations and collaborations.  

We started with this fascinating piece of information: that DNCB was used as an alternative AIDS treatment in late 1980s and early 1990s and that it was acquired through KODAK and also used in colour film processing. This connection of film and healing, especially in terms of the history of AIDS, was super interesting to us. There was just so much you could draw out of that.

Emily Doucet: I wanted to begin with this wonderful line from your website where you describe your projects as beginning with “fragments of history, a rumor, a personal encounter or a distant memory.”  To me, this description seems tied up in the often-collaborative nature of your projects, and so I’m wondering how, for you, these processes of historical inquiry or research also become acts of collaboration—with people, with images, objects, or memories?

Oliver Husain: I often have a hard time describing what my work is about and this was one way to describe it. I realize that these ideas might seem really spread out or that these methods might seem very unconnected, but all of these strategies point to me having a personal investment in the beginning—a geographical or personal link that sparks an idea. And so of course that often happens through conversation, by connecting with somebody, or by telling each other stories. In that way, the conversational element is built in. I get excited about something when I start talking about it. Before then it’s not really real, then through talking about it I notice what is exciting for myself. Through this process, I begin to understand what direction I want to take the project in. 

To me one of the radical offerings of history is that our understanding of anything that might seem natural at any given time is actually the result of historically contingent phenomena. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this sense of chance, or contingency, that seems to flavor your interest in different historical moments or stories.

I came to these themes through visual art, through the idea of conversation, the idea of gossip—this appreciation of queer knowledge and gossip, oral histories, or unwritten histories. All of these things are really interesting to me. I did a research residency at NTU CCA Singapore two years ago. This was geared towards proper, Biennale-style research artists who work with much more solid methods than I do. It was interesting for me to connect with that kind of methodology. In Singapore they have a lot of archives—one of the national, and very problematic, things they do is that they try to be the archivists for the region. It is kind of a colonial project of Singapore. When I spoke to an archivist working at the Asian Film Archive, I learned that they think a lot like me. They said, ‘there is no such thing as gossip, we collect everything, all versions into this archive.’ It’s really progressive and fascinating because they collect everything, and make sure everything is online and easily available. They make it all public.

Your recent collaborative work with Kerstin Schroedinger explores the material and cultural history of Dinitrochlorobenzene (DNCB). The chemical is a compelling historical subject in part because the history of its use intersects with a radical history of community-engaged education in activist communities. I’m wondering if you could talk about how these multi-layered histories have structured this work.    

We started with this fascinating piece of information: that DNCB was used as an alternative AIDS treatment in late 1980s and early 1990s and that it was acquired through KODAK and also used in colour film processing. This connection of film and healing, especially in terms of the history of AIDS, was super interesting to us. There was just so much you could draw out of that. We began to learn a lot more about the period. We started to talk to witnesses and did interviews with people who used DNCB on their own bodies. It wasn’t a substance they took as an oral medicine, they did not swallow it but instead painted it on their skin. Because it is a toxic substance this caused an allergic reaction in some people which was, at least temporarily, good for the immune system. It has never been scientifically researched how beneficial this is. This was again something that fascinated us, the idea of painting it on the skin, the connection of skin and film, how both are surfaces that are porous, lead somewhere else, entry points. The interviews I mentioned were a reality check. People who remember the period mostly talked about how it was a moment where they had nothing left to lose and had to try everything, how DNCB stands for this moment of despair. We had to find a way to acknowledge that and build it into the project. For the show in Berlin, we made an accompanying publication where we present our research, including an essay on this history which hasn’t really been written about. The other parts of the exhibition are more speculative. There are few photos we found of people actually using DNCB. We re-created all the actions and gestures that we learned about, collected them, and did a performative version which is more of a fantasy.  

You are also engaging with artists who are invested in the history of this treatment. You’re not simply talking about DNCB in this fixed moment, but how it evolved as a cultural symbol over time. Can you talk a bit about your conversations with other artists about this chemical?

Kerstin, my collaborator, and I presented this project a couple of times as a lecture-performance and then realized that it is such a perfect conversation starter, so we deliberately started to invite other people. We invited Andy Fabo to talk about his work for one of the presentations and we also began to look at a lot of videotapes from the time. Knowledge about alternative AIDs treatments was distributed not only through the mail, but also through VHS tapes. Not just about DNCB but other alternative treatments, or just medical knowledge more generally. There was very little official support, so this was a way communities shared medical information. It’s really interesting that artists did that kind of work, and how that created a different artistic approach that had this concrete use value—in between activism, video art, and public television.

It kind of builds on what the media studies historian Cait McKinney has called “information activism,” that all these different media and artistic formats are crucial to both community building and information sharing at these critical moments.

One of the most important influences for us is the UK artist Stuart Marshall. He was an artist turned activist and made educational programs for BBC, teaching people about medical and queer histories. He himself was struggling with the official pharmaceutical system. He resisted AIDS therapy and tried different alternative treatments. These were tragically unsuccessful and he passed in the early 1990s. His work hit closest to what we were researching, so we kept re-visiting it, as our checkpoint.

 I’m also curious about how you struck upon, or came to, the aesthetic of the film and video elements of the project. It draws on other aspects of your work that I’m familiar with but the project also visually foregrounds the care that is so central to the history of DNCB. I’m curious about how your and Kerstin’s research informed this aesthetic and how that shaped the moving image elements of this work?

 It was an idea of recreating some of those actions and gestures that we found through research, but in a more speculative form—confusing the surfaces, adding body paint, makeup, adding coloured lights to make skin colours unreadable. We wanted to diffuse the focus on that kind of identity. We have very different ages, very different bodies in front of the camera. They all kind of blur into the synthetic chemical colours. We also use other surfaces like cushions, leather, different kinds of skins, adding a layer of vinyl between the lens and the people, to highlight this idea of the surface of colour and to link that with the idea of painting on the skin and influencing the body through the surface. Aesthetically, we were influenced by 1980s and 1990s videos by AIDS activists. We realized that these works were often very humorous, satirical, with a very different sensibility than we now have towards care and health. 

It looks very refined now but it was actually a  simple setup with only two lights and a tiny set. The cast and the crew are one and the same. The friends who were in front of the camera were also behind the camera. It was a very performance-based, unstructured, non-scripted shoot. It was very different from how I usually work, with no real idea of how this video would later be edited. We didn’t record any sound during filming, then afterwards asked an artist to create a fantasy version of all that she saw in the footage. She created sounds for the touching and rubbing of the skin, using different materials to record that sound. Those unedited sounds were then sent to a musician—another layer of translation. The musician Ain Bailey is part of that generation who witnessed the AIDs crisis in her own group of friends. She was thinking about the club music at the time, and created something out of those sounds, thinking about her communities in that era. Every aspect of the production had these layers, bringing together different communities.

This community-based, collaborative investigation into the relationship between form and content seems to be a characteristic of your work. I also wanted to touch on this other project Streamy Windows, part of the Immaterial Architecture program at the University of Toronto Art Museum, curated by Yan Wu. It struck me that there are some parallels in how these projects were composed, in these references to television history, so I was interested in how these evolving screen formats influenced this work?

This was definitely a pandemic project. I have to really thank Yan for trusting me with developing a livestream project. I didn’t think I’d enjoy it and it was a steep learning curve to work with live media, but it turned out to be a revelation, perfect for me. It was like, why didn’t I think of this myself, it is such a good fit. I realized that when you are doing a livestream you can use all the tools available to filmmakers. You can pre-produce some elements, you can have collaborators, you can work with cameras, musicians, and all that, but you don’t have to finialize it in this anal way through the editing process. It can be much looser and have the quality of a live performance. This was super exciting to me. Streamy Windows was the first project I did with this technology. I was trying out different possibilities, going through different variations of what I could do—being excited by the technology. Because it was a live broadcast, the reference to public television just kind of fell into place. Originally there was an exhibition planned at the University of Toronto Art Museum that Yan was curating. She moved the whole exhibition online and commissioned a whole group of artists to do something. She had wanted to show a previous video that I did with dancers, called French Exit. Since my invitation was based on that work, I thought that this was a good opportunity to reconnect with that same group of people and work with them again. I also wanted to spread around the production funding as I knew that the dancers and performers were especially struggling last year. The whole project was based on the previous film and picked up the choreographic ideas from the shorter video and translated them into the live performance. Yan called the overall project Immaterial Architecture. But the Internet isn’t immaterial, there is a material impact. I included this information on the environmental impact and CO emissions of streaming media in some of the scenes. This sobering subtitle strolls through the piece. I have to add though, my information at the time was based on some NGO websites that had published this information and it has since been challenged. I don’t think the impact of the program itself that I was streaming was quite as dramatic as the numbers indicate, but it’s still something to think about.

The performance was based on different screen spaces, engaging ideas of flatness, weaving different spaces together through the screen interface. The screen is split into bands and the dancers weave through each other, through those bands. All that was based on thinking about the screen space and the virtual meeting space, these two different kinds of vectors wrestling on screen. 

This struck me too, the textural interruption of the live stream. It almost feels kind of boring now to say that a lot of us are on our screens all the time but there is this feeling of text and image being an interface to the world.

 The performance was based on different screen spaces, engaging ideas of flatness, weaving different spaces together through the screen interface. The screen is split into bands and the dancers weave through each other, through those bands. All that was based on thinking about the screen space and the virtual meeting space, these two different kinds of vectors wrestling on screen. Text was just another one of those layers. On YouTube, there are a lot of virtual spaces that you can use for relaxation including composite images of cabins in the woods with rain falling. People put up these 8-hour videos of collages, dream spaces with rain falling for sleeping or relaxation. Your computer screen is not a relaxing thing to look at, but have that play for eight hours and you can fall into it. I thought this was the perfect metaphor for these opposing forces.

You address media histories and the material reality of media so beautifully in your work, particularly in your disavowal of any hierarchies between different spheres of culture. I’m curious about your own media use and how it informs your work. What media do you get the most pleasure out of?

Like all of us, it’s diverse; I like a lot of things! I watch a lot of things on Twitch, I find that really inspiring, how the platform exploded not only in the art world but in the whole drag scene. Drag performers suddenly became broadcasters and got more and more creative with their streams and how they worked around, for example, censorship issues on these platforms. That was fascinating—a really inspiring shift that I saw. Suddenly, there was this huge explosion of media literacy—so many people were becoming producers in fascinating ways. Then, more old-school, right now in Berlin, there were some outdoor screenings of experimental work and I realized how much I loved this, watching experimental films on a screen with a group of people! 

My awareness of media infrastructure has changed so much during this year, every discussion at an art event is like ‘okay, what platform is it on?’ It really does de-stabilize some of these media infrastructures we’ve taken for granted in the past.

There is one more streaming project I should tell you about that is literally about this idea. The Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC) did a project titled The Breadth Of earlier this year around their archives that was originally meant as a conference but was moved online. I collaborated with Victoria Cheong, a musician who performs as New Chance. She created music for 16 mm films I had selected from the CFMDC archive. The earliest one was from 2000, the oldest from 1968. With the help of the CFMDC crew, we projected those films and then streamed the projections live with live music from Victoria. It was all about this idea of translating from one media to another, from one space to another, one frame rate to another. There was a lot of translation going on. Victoria put a lot of work into this, but there weren’t that many people watching, it was at a moment when everyone was over the streams—bleeding eyes, no more streams! I hope we can recreate it at some point; it was really nice.

An attendant question to the last one—because you so often work collaboratively, what does this collaborative research process look like in terms of —do you kind of use collaborative software, share images, draw together, talk on the phone, what does that look like?

Kerstin and I have been working on this project since 2017 and in the beginning there were in-person meetings and trips to start it. After that, we were meeting on Facetime once a week over the past few years. During that time we didn’t so much produce things as stay connected and talk about the project. If we had an actual gig where we were supposed to show something, those were moments of production. There was not a single method, it was all of the things you described, and then finally actually being together to create in the same space. 

You just mentioned this sense of conversation was untethered from any sense of productivity, a sense of continuing this conversation, so it brings me back to the line that we began with, this story telling part of your practice is embedded in personal encounters, gossip, etc. so maybe you can share any further thoughts on that sense of collaboration.

Absolutely. When you find that kind of conversational connection it is so lovely to depart from there and each do your thing, see how that corresponds, how that mirrors or reflects on each other. To not over-rehearse it, to let that grow in different ways. This kind of collaboration needs a lot of trust, you can only do it over time in order to let that initial spark grow in different, unforeseen directions.