Catalogue > At random

On the stage of an empty museum auditorium, a small amateur theatre company rehearses fragments of the novel Ochered’ for the first time. The backdrop is Soviet Russia’s Banner of Victory. As they articulate the phrases, the actors taste the rhythm and flow of Sorokin`s dialogues. Nine young people thus try to familiarize themselves with the writers` notations of1980s (street) language, and with the novel`s overall dark humour. Vladimir Sorokin’s avant-garde novel Ochered’ was completed in1983 and first published in France. Written in dialogues only, it illustrates a scene in which Russians standing in a long queue in the streets of Moscow, wait to obtain their cut of scarce supplies. The waiting people joke, chat about the news, solve crossword puzzles and argue. The dialogue format, more importantly, the leitmotif of waiting and suspended desire, inspired Lamers to re-edit parts of the novel into a ‘play’ for nine actors. Ochered (the rehearsal) examines how contemporary young Russians interact with precedent social and political circumstances and ideologies. It also explores how past rhetoric and convictions can still be traced in the bodies and gestures of today’s people

Ine Lamers lives and works in Rotterdam, Netherlands Artist Ine Lamers has been active since 1990 as an independent fine artist. Her medium of primary interest has been photography, but since 2000 video has also played an important role in her work. Large format colour photos, slideshow or video installations in which narrative and abstract elements are juxtaposed with one another illustrate urban still-lives with traces of human activity, or paralyzed scenes on which actors take stage. The works form a study after subjective experience and a research into the narrative potentialities of photographic and video media. Lamers seeks out stories and buried memories. She travels to countries where ideology is encapsulated in the architecture and the city space. Socialist city architecture and the traces of communist ideology have central significance in recent photographic and video works. The dystopian scenes in urban peripheries are often captured at dusk or at night, or with actors on theatrical stages. The obscurity and artificiality evoke a view on how the past is still part of the present. Lamers` photos and videos purposefully offer us fragments. In exhibitions the viewer becomes part of the reconstruction of a non-linear visual narrative.