Erik Kamaletdinov

Part voyeuristic inquisitiveness, part need to connect to people, In My Room combines my love for photography and people.The current goal is simple - photograph people in their own homes. Every person is so different and this is reflected in the way the inside of their house looks. By limiting myself to residents of The Hague I hope to show the breadth of personality and mystery hidden behind these walls we so often pass but never see behind.

Part voyeuristic inquisitiveness, part need to connect to people, In My Room combines my love for photography and people.The current goal is simple - photograph people in their own homes. Every person is so different and this is reflected in the way the inside of their house looks. By limiting myself to residents of The Hague I hope to show the breadth of personality and mystery hidden behind these walls we so often pass but never see behind.

towards the end of 2022, I teamed up with the artist-run space Trixie to create an event where neighborhood children (and their parents) could come together and make a big work of art together. I’m an art teacher for children at Art-S-Cool, an after-school art school for children in Schilderswijk, here in The Hague, and this connection allowed me to make an event that not only was about making art, but also about making a space for people to come together. The event was called THE THING and saw over twenty kids freely make a huge sculpture from leftover materials that all Trixie artists had contributed. The event was a big success and the results astounded - the resulting sculpture was crazy, funny, weird, in the way that only children could dream up. Moreover, it was a vibrant and colorful event that saw parents and caregivers taking part in an art-related activity they would otherwise not have done, in an artist-initiative they would likely not have visited otherwise.

towards the end of 2022, I teamed up with the artist-run space Trixie to create an event where neighborhood children (and their parents) could come together and make a big work of art together. I’m an art teacher for children at Art-S-Cool, an after-school art school for children in Schilderswijk, here in The Hague, and this connection allowed me to make an event that not only was about making art, but also about making a space for people to come together. The event was called THE THING and saw over twenty kids freely make a huge sculpture from leftover materials that all Trixie artists had contributed. The event was a big success and the results astounded - the resulting sculpture was crazy, funny, weird, in the way that only children could dream up. Moreover, it was a vibrant and colorful event that saw parents and caregivers taking part in an art-related activity they would otherwise not have done, in an artist-initiative they would likely not have visited otherwise.

performance for PIP EXPO

performance for PIP EXPO

With the basis of the bicycle as something simple that I just can't wrap my head around (how it stays upright) I take the audience on a narrative journey through certain moments in human history bound by the occurence of one extraordinary event, and embody different characters caught in strange cyclical scenarios.

If our universe is so unimaginably huge with countless of habitable planets, why have we until now found no evidence of life beside our own planet? It may be that it’s difficult for life to appear as is, or that once it has, it’s difficult to survive in suboptimal conditions. These are the great filters - barriers that make it hard for life to proliferate further. Some say the great filter is behind us, that as improbable as it is, life on planet earth has jumped all the hurdles in its path and is now advanced enough to grow indefinitely. There is however the idea that we haven’t yet passed the great filter, and that’s something that frightens me. What if the reason we see no life in the stars is that something happened to those intelligent life forms before they could venture beyond the confines of their own planet or solar system? What if self destruction is an inevitable outcome of high intelligence? I feel that recently the world has been progressing and moving so incredibly fast that it feels like our control of the technological forces we ourselves created is slipping out from our hands, and we’re heading into this bleak uncertain future.

In this performance I used 100 meters of red yarn to write the Portuguese phrase "sei lá" on the floor of the exhibition hall. The phrase roughly translates to "I don't know", but bears a closer similarity to the Dutch phrase "weet ik veel". After the yarn finished I tied the end to a Yellow Bike (a paid bicycle service), unlocked it with my phone, and biked out of the exhibition hall and museum dragging the yarn behind me, effectively unrolling the entire thing within 30 seconds. I biked around the university campus for ten minutes, trailing the 100 meters of yarn behind me until I came to a dead end. I got off the bike and promptly started collecting the yarn, pulling it towards me. At one point it got stuck, and since it was dark and yarn was long I couldn't see the end, so I followed it instead. I found a water bottle tied to the end of the yarn. Someone had tied it and left. I brought the yarn and bottle back to the exhibition hall.

Performers ride around making sounds with their voices and bikes. They join into a chorus before breaking apart again. Performers were given the freedom to make whatever sounds they liked and keep performing as long as they thought fit.