A new story has been invented and is told in a fantasy world inspired by shared interests and production processes. Saskia Olde Wolbers' virtual reality video projection is combined here with Sigalit Landau's 'zoetrope installation' and connected sounds. In a large darkened space we see a video projection covering one entire wall. 'Day Glo' is the meticulously reconstructed story of a man who one day decides to open a virtual reality theme park in his area. The man is a little unclear about what virtual reality actually involves, but his wife has seen something about it on television. " It allows you to relive all your memories", she says. The decor of the place where the couple first met is recreated and they reexperience their early love. The woman falls in love again, albeit with the younger, virtual version of her husband, and decides to stay on in virtuality. We see an artificial landscape. The camera tracks across a cylindrical miniature film-set, consisting of a wide road along which all kinds of strange organisms are planted. These curious surrounding are completely dark but artificially illuminated by hundreds of small lamps. While a voice-over reads a letter and reports on the man who lost his wife in virtual reality (where he is still looking for her), the eye of the spectator is led by the camera's movement over the constantly winding road , and slowly the pictures acquire content. Sigalit Landau's installation uses an analogous image process, albeit at a more low-tech level. Her work consists of a three-dimensional metal construction onto which oil-drums, cut in two and perforated with little peep-holes, have been mounted at eye-level. The inner walls of the drums are covered with still photographs which create the illusion of a moving image when the viewer sets the drum spinning. With this optical effect Landau returns to the origins of cinema. In the closed atmosphere of her 'zoetropes' various curious scenes are enacted, including a group performance by a 'hoolahoop' collective and a scene portraying a man who feels that his privacy has been invaded each time he clocks on at work. These are told along with other picture stories, all bearing upon ideas about people in search of something who enter or exit from or into different worlds. Earlier in her career, Landau treated subjects such as migration, immigration and the feeling of being foreign in an 'other' environment. Both the 'zoetrope' installation and the virtual reality video hark back to the ideas of the science fiction movies of the 1960s, equipped with a liberal dose of constructive naivety, which here emerge as not simply fantasies about the future but also as reflections of the period in which they were made. Both the viewer of the works and the characters in them exist in their 'own worlds'. The spectator activates the images in Landau's installation but is merely a passer-by. The story in 'Day Glo' is not told directly to the viewer, but via a letter to a potential buyer written by the owner of the theme park. The video shows the virtual world in which the wife moves, yet she herself gives little indication of being physical or mentally present in this bizarre landscape. 'The Natives Are Restless' is the first joint exhibition by Saskia Olde Wolbers and Sigalit Landau.

– Marieke van Hal