Reanimation (Baloo Stripped Bare)

9th Quebec City Biennial, Galerie des arts visuels

16th February - 21st April 2019

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Commissioned for the 9th Quebec City Biennial, Recomposition (Baloo Stripped Bare), 2019 is a four screen video installation based on Disney's The Jungle Book (1967). Building on his earlier work Reanimation (I Wan’na Be Like You), 2017, which saw Oliver collaborate with over 2500 school children aged 0 to 13, each animation frame is re-drawn by an individual child with their idiosyncratic visual imagination becoming part of the collective whole.

  

The work focuses on the point at which Baloo is dressed as a female ape in a bid to seduce King Louis and save Mowgli. The moment in which his disguise falls away flickers across four screens. In quick succession, the startled faces of the animals look on as Baloo’s true identity is revealed. This reinterpretation teases out the charged cultural and sexual identity politics of the ambivalent narrative.