I ♥ Snail is an immersive video installation by Oliver Husain that examines IMAX cinema as both an experimental film format emerging in the 1960s and a technology later mobilized as a tool of nation-building. The exhibition title is drawn from a sticker found in the archived papers of Toronto-based filmmaker Graeme Ferguson, one of the inventors of IMAX cinema. Conceived at Montreal’s Expo 67, and first realized at Expo Osaka (1970), IMAX was developed from the experimental film and expanded cinema movements into a global exhibition standard. The elaborate early theatres were significant architectural landmarks, operating as both national expos and theme parks, while serving as highly visible sites of cultural ambition and technological spectacle.
This exhibition centres on the premiere of Golden Snail (2026), a new edit and immersive 3D installation of Husain’s original IMAX film Garden of the Legend of the Golden Snail (2019). The work takes as its point of departure the Keong Emas (Golden Snail) Theatre in Jakarta, inaugurated in 1984 as Indonesia’s first IMAX cinema. Conceived under the initiative of the late Madame Suharto, the theatre’s monumental, snail-shaped architecture draws on a popular folk tale about a princess transformed into a snail, while simultaneously operating as a symbol of technological prestige and state-led modernization.
Husain situates this cinematic landmark alongside another contemporaneous project: the introduction of the Golden Apple snail as a new protein source for rural populations in Indonesia. Promoted as an efficient, future-oriented solution to food security, the snail was framed as a rational intervention aligned with national development goals, even as it later proved to be deeply environmentally destructive. By bringing these two histories into dialogue, Golden Snail traces how spectacle and sustenance, myth and modernization, were mobilized through a shared figure. Moving fluidly between the miniature and the monumental, the film reflects on how grand technological visions and everyday biological interventions alike became tools of nation-building, revealing the slippages between aspiration, control, and unintended consequence.
The exhibition also includes the premiere of IMAX Nation (2026), a film installation housed within a series of sculptural works representing various IMAX theatres constructed from paper. The installation contains a Super 8 film shot over three years at early IMAX sites including Ontario Place in Toronto, La Géode in Paris, Futuroscope in Poitiers, and Taman Mini in Jakarta. In a deliberate reversal of scale, this film about the largest analogue format ever produced was shot on Super 8, the smallest available gauge, foregrounding the paradoxes embedded in IMAX’s technological scale and utopian ambition.
Artist Bio
Artist and filmmaker Oliver Husain is based in Toronto, Canada. His projects are often collaborations with other artists and friends; and often begin with a fragment of history, a rumour, a personal encounter or a distant memory. He uses a wide range of cinematic languages, technical experiments and visual pleasures — such as dance, puppetry, costume, special effects — to animate his research and fold the viewers into complex narrative set-ups.
