Resort

In Resort, an immersive video projection designed for a panoramic screen, Matilda Aslizadeh posits the tourist resort as a microcosm, a reflection of both the global economy and the complex histories of colonization. Inspired by the cinema of attractions and historical and contemporary representations of space, Aslizadeh uses the panoramic screen to echo the immersive “resort experience” while exploring new ways of telling stories in a gallery space. Resort combines staged actions and images found online to develop a fictional narrative set in a walled tourist complex where—lured by the promise of unlimited beauty, nature and ever-lasting happiness—visitors and residents desperately want to be able to stay. Recreating the experience through multiple views and staged scenes, she weaves a complex narrative structure juxtaposing three different-but-interconnected stories. The dialogues between characters in each scene function as short storylines that encapsulate both the resort’s promise and its failure to deliver. Individually, each scene produces coherent subject positions with which the viewer can identify. In parallel, panoramic views and soundscapes from both inside and outside the complex’s walls provide a series of targeted affective and sensory cues, as lush sounds of the interior (exotic natural landscapes) are contrasted with the noises from the outside (atomic explosions, sea monsters, industrial contamination, war and death). Ultimately, what drives Aslizadeh explorations with narrative, found images and immersive cinema is to interrogate our ability to imagine the possibility of the existence of a radical outside.

Produced by the Foreman Art Gallery, with the support of Bishop’s University, the Canada Council for the Arts, the City of Sherbrooke and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

The Foreman Art Gallery wishes to thank the artist for their collaboration.