Oliver Husain

SAVAC (South Asian Visual Arts Centre) and the Centre for South Asian Critical Humanities (CSACH) are pleased to welcome Oliver Husain as the winter 2025 artist-in-residence at the University of Toronto Mississauga (UTM). Over the next three months, Oliver will develop  a body of research through site-responsive and site-specific artistic investigations, culminating in a non-permanent installation on campus. 

Oliver Husain is a Toronto-based artist and filmmaker who works across disciplines. His practice builds on collaborations with artists and friends, often starting from a fragment of history, a personal encounter, a rumor, or a memory. He cheerfully confuses art world orthodoxies and the conventions of cinema; deploying dance, puppetry, costume, and special effects as tools to transform his research into narratives that charm viewers into intricately constructed complications.

The residency will invite art into the academic spaces of the university and give students and faculty a place to think about the role of contemporary art in public conversations. CSACH brings together the University of Toronto’s outstanding tri-campus South Asia faculty and graduate students for workshops and research activities. With the diverse student body of UTM and the larger Mississauga area, the program will help to develop an appreciation of contemporary art as practiced by racialized artists in the wider community while contributing significantly to UTM’s cultural landscape. 

As the artist develops their creative work at UTM, discussion of their practice will be integrated into courses in History, History of Religions, Women and Gender Studies, Visual Culture and Communication, Art History, Art Studio, and/or Cinema Studies. Interested classes will invite the selected artist to come and speak about their work and engage the class in participatory/experiential activities related to artmaking as a response to political and social transformations in contemporary South Asia and the South Asian diaspora