Night in the Garden of Love (VR), 2023

A new 2-player VR environment launched as part of Shezad Dawood's 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.”

Curated by Zoë Gray & Helena Kritis.

Produced by UBIK Productions. Co-commissioned by WIELS, Brussels and Aga Khan Museum, Toronto.

Click here to view a trailer.