Night in the Garden of Love VR

2023, VR environment, Duration Variable

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A new 2-player VR environment will be launched as part of Shezad Dawood's upcoming exhibition titled Night in the Garden of Love after Lateef’s 1988 novella, the exhibition features music and a selection of drawings by Lateef together with five new, interconnected works by Dawood.

Two visitors at a time can wear VR head-sets to enter a virtual reality experience, riffing on scenes from Lateef’s novella. A key figure is the Mutant, who moves through the script like a dancer, guiding visitors through Lateef’s vision, as re-imagined by Dawood. The soundtrack features original recordings by Lateef released on his own label, YAL Records. This is the first time Dawood has created a dual-player VR experience, to underscore the idea of a garden as a space for intimacy and dialogue.

Dawood sees this exhibition as a dialogue between his practice and Lateef’s, like the call-and-response exchanges in musical improvisation. Dawood considers Lateef’s novella to be a forerunner of much recent cli-fi: sci-fi exploring climate issues. “There are all sorts of portals within Lateef’s novella, which moves from a dystopian future Detroit, into radical ideas of ecology and recycling,” he states. Dawood is interested in technology for its transformative potential to help us imagine new forms of togetherness. “It is meant to be an almost metaphysical space, but I read Lateef’s garden as a virtual space.”

Written and Directed by

Shezad Dawood

Produced by

Miranda Sharp

Coders & 3D Design

Monochrome

Mutant dancer

Wan-Lun Yu

Tracks

Daydream, Phase Transition, Instrumental Ritornello #1, Monadic Adventure, Instrumental Gospel, Saturday Morning, all tracks composed by Yusef Lateef for YAL Records and published by Spirit One Music Crescendo obo Alnur Music (BMI)

Musical Trio

Mia Theodoratus (harp), Adam Rudolph (slit drum), Ralph Miles Jones (bamboo flute)

Voices

Ilham Tamet (Arabic & French), Huan Mus (Portuguese), Batya Sobel, Gwen Laster and Ralph Miles Jones (English)

Film Footage

Robbrecht Desmet, Ruben Desiere, Lennert De Taeye

Exhibited at

WIELS, Brussels

Aga Khan Museum, Toronto