Catalogue > At random

The installation consists of twelve filmed life-size portraits of actors viewed on six screens, each impersonating their favourite character of the opposite sex, performed in six-minute monologues. In total the installations lasts 72 minutes. The monologues are extracted from, or inspired by lines delivered by iconic characters in drama and literature, both historical and contemporary, criss-crossing time, space and language. During the 72 minute-installation all actors remain visually present, while only one voice speaks at a time. Between silence and the spoken word, the intrinsic tension of male/female border zones is redefined. The result is multidimensional: portraits of our time containing speeches and visions that bring revealing thoughts and insightful conversations about identity, revolution and desire in what feels like a personal confrontation with each actor. We challenge static, mental and cultural conventions by giving back the imagination to the limitations on gender and sexual identity.

Diana Blok is a self-taught visual artist born in Montevideo, Uruguay (1952), she lived in Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia before choosing Amsterdam as a base from which she could function more freely as a female artist. Her nomadic background allows Blok to capture different cultures and identities in her photography and video installations, challenging the structures of the established order as an inspirator, innovator and connector. She investigates subjects as identity, gender, sexual diversity, family structures and culture with poetic and confrontational imagery. In the past 6 years her work evolved into interactive-video installation ’Gender Monologues’, unsettling the gender binary and performing archetypes of femininity and masculinity blurring the disciplines of the moving image, performance and literature. She has had numerous exhibitions worldwide, received the grant for Established Artist from the Mondriaan Foundation in 2020 and will hold a retrospective in the Cobra Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art (NL) in 2024.