The Beauties of Lucknow, 2023
Reactive dye printing on linen and silkscreen printing on iridescent vinyl, installed as panels on existing light fixtures

Ondaatje Hall is the cultural heart of Massey College. It is a place of high ceremony but also the site of daily informal gathering for the interdisciplinary scholars and visitors who constitute its dynamic community. Entering the hall, a visitor notes how its form, skilfully crafted by architect Ron Thom, bears the imprint of British colonial rule. The room extracts from the design logic of Oxford and Cambridge Universities and distills it into a modern Canadian iteration. In celebration of Massey College’s 60th anniversary, Toronto-based artist and filmmaker Oliver Husain has been invited to reconsider this magnificent site through a 21st-century lens.

Recognized for his intuitive ease with mixing forms, Husain creates works—spanning installation, animation, film projection, and performance—that often depart from a fragment of history—a rumour, a personal encounter, or a distant memory. In this case, it is his interest in The Beauties of Lucknow, an album of photographic portraits taken in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1874 and attributed to Darogah Abbas Ali, a municipal engineer for the British-controlled government of India. The famous sitters, known as tawaifs, assumed multiple roles as singers, courtesans, dancers, and actors performing the popular Urdu play and opera Indar Sabha, a love story between a fairy and a prince. The women portrayed exerted unusual influence and independence, amassing vast private wealth. When the British took control of the region, they dismantled the traditions of the royal court, and the courtesans, perceived as threatening symbols of resistance, fell from favour. Nearly two decades later, when Abbas Ali took their portraits, it was an act of restitution, a refutation of prejudice, and a celebration of beauty.

As if studying the faces of loved ones in a cherished album, Husain holds a séance with these historical images, unfolding the archive into three-dimensional form as a set of screens for the light fixtures that illuminate the hall. Reading and rereading Abbas Ali’s photographs, Husain repeats elements for emphasis and introduces iconography that stretches the time and space of the source. The Beauties are conjured back to life in the here and now. Many of these pictorial additions—books, records, and domestic ornaments—are drawn from Husain’s personal remembrances, linking autobiographical elements to the reading of the photographic archive. Co-mingling historic precedent with contemporary aesthetics, Husain unfurls a radiant design that breathes new energy into the space. He transforms the room while highlighting some of its intrinsic properties—the hall’s function as a meeting place, a site of celebration, and, above all, a space that holds the murmurs of a continuous dialogue across time.

SARAH ROBAYO SHERIDAN, CONSULTING CURATOR, MASSEY COLLEGE

The new commission was initiated by art committee chair John Massey and curated by Sarah Robayo Sheridan in celebration of the college's 60th anniversary. 
Fabrication by Laura Honsberger, production adviser Jeremy Laing, silkscreen Color Code Printing.
Opening event was made possible through the support of the Massey Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Photos by Toni Hafkenscheid