EMERGENCY MEMORY

Husain explores the themes of identity, displacement, and memory through mixed media using both video and stacked steel trunks. His exhibition explores the evolution of memory through history; how one can be used to shape, manipulate, or distort the other and how this dynamic is influenced by the hierarchies of culture through generations.

“The trunks are a part of an evolving storyline in my recent works. The trunks fall into a form of architecture, imposing space and outlining the agency of the building. It also attempts to incorporate elements of time, through projected moving images and distorted reflections of the passersby. The trunks also carry the idea of memory storehouses as well as vehicles of mobility, passage, transfer and migration, on a varying scale. Their chrome veneer and mirrored interiors reflect the location and the viewer’s voyeuristic presence into this timeline.”

The seven-channel video that sits in the open mouth of each vertically stacked trunk is silent and focuses on stationary images in stretched timespans, like breathing still lives. “This work alludes to a limited bandwidth for retaining relevance of a curated history. There is only so much that you can relate with at a given period of time. Your individual universe runs out of space for history. Empires of Memory is a meditation on this curated history in the age of forgetting.”

On display at Vida Downtown Dubai until April 15