Bunraku does not aim at animating an inanimate object so as to make a piece of the body, a  scrap of a human, 'alive', while retaining its vocation as a part; it is not the simulation that it seeks but, so to speak, it’s sensuous abstraction.
(R. Barthes, Empire of Signs, Animate/Inanimate)

Liane Lang composes scenarios using very life-like latex casts and models to construct photographs, video and animation that exist between narrative fiction and still-life composition. Set in spaces that appear contrived, and in themselves sculptural, the photographs represent a highly controlled, single view point on a sculptural scenario. The images can be read as both narrative fiction and still-life composition and explore an uncertain status between living and nonliving that can only exist in art.
The images aim to extract from the elaborately inanimate, a moment of animacy, a subtle shift between the observation of a figure as object and as active agent. The figures inhabit the environment like spectral presences, simulating touch and sensation, engaged in mock reflection. They provide a vacancy for unselfconscious voyeurism, for watching nobody through the key hole.

In the series Casts, Liane Lang was working with the cast collection at the Royal Academy. These are plaster copies of classical sculptures that line the corridors of the art school. Her latex figures, produced in the same casting process, are involved in an interaction with the sculptures, creating humorous and erotic moments of intimacy between plaster and rubber. The roles of model and art work, of subject and object can be conflated and confused through the control and surface afforded by the photographic image. The classical sculptures represent an idea of art history and education that has long been successfully challenged and replaced. Rather than attempting a resurrection of these obliterated symbols, her figures are there to fawn over and fetishise their ruined remains.

Whilst the concerns of the series lies in the relationship between sculpture and animacy, the medium of photography is the crucial tool to allow the merging of materials and surfaces and thereby the initial deception of the viewer. The image is there to retain both possibilities, the erotic and emotive narrative and the formal arrangement and composition of inanimate objects.