Oliver Husain (b. Frankfurt, Germany) is an artist and filmmaker. His projects are often collaborations with other artists and friends, and often begin with a fragment of history, a rumour, a personal encounter, or a distant memory. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages, technical experiments, and visual pleasures—such as dance, puppetry, costumes, special effects—to animate his research and fold viewers into complex narrative set-ups. Recent projects include The Beauties of Lucknow, a site-specific installation commissioned by Massey College (Toronto) and lenticoolers (with Malik McKoy) at Susan Hobbs (Toronto).
Kerstin Schroedinger (b. Trier, Germany) is an artist working in performance, film/video, and sound. Her historiographic practice questions the means of image production, historical linearities, and the ideological certainties of representation. She researches the coinciding histories of industrialization and film, and her works and curatorial practice are often collaborative. Schroedinger’s works have been screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Forum Expanded at the Berlinale, Berlin International Film Festival, Wavelengths (Toronto), mumok (Vienna), and have been exhibited at the Istanbul Biennial, MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge), Photo Cairo, nGbK Berlin, and Kiev Biennial, among other places. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
For GTA24, Husain and Schroedinger will feature DNCB (2021), a 3-channel video installation that reflects on the complex history of Dinitrochlorobenzene, a chemical substance that is used in the processing of color film, and that was engaged with as an experimental alternative AIDS treatment in the 1980s and 90s. Husain and Schroedinger will also present Hypericin Yellow Movie, a new lecture performance at MOCA based upon this body of research.
GTA24 Live
GTA24 Live: Hypericin Yellow Movie, Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger
Friday, May 31, 2024 | 7:00 pm | Free
Hypericin Yellow Movie is a live performance presented by Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger. DNCB stands for Dinitrochlorobenzene. It is used in the development of analogue colour film. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the substance was also employed as a treatment in alternative AIDS clinics around the USA and Canada. Its actual benefits were never scientifically studied. Around the same time in Germany a study of the flowering plant St. John’s wort as a treatment for HIV received government support while other AIDS research and care were severely underfunded. In this performance, Oliver Husain and Kerstin Schroedinger share some of their research into these two overlapping histories and relate them to health, skin, light, and film.
