The exhibition of a dream

Dreams by Gabriel Abrantes, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, FM Einheit, Tim Etchells, Alexandre Estrela, Susie Green, David Link, Pierre Paulin, Emilie Pitoiset, Lee Ranaldo, Susan Stenger, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Interpreted by FM Einheit with Volker Kamp, Robert Poss, Susan Stenger, Erika Stucky, Saskia von Klitzing and the singers of the Coro Gulbenkian

Played through the Mandalas by José de Almada Negreiros, Philippe Decrauzat, Myriam Gourfink, Olivier Mosset, and Eduardo Terrazas

An exhibition by Mathieu Copeland
 

Conceived as a record, The exhibition of a dream is formed of 12 dreams interpreted as so many songs, exploded in time as these are played in the otherwise empty gallery following drawings of mandalas, temporary and evolving patterns of shapes and forms.

Disembodied in space, The exhibition of a dream highlights the complex beauty of how to generate a dream. A shared experience to be shared within our own personal inner space, these free mental images are constantly generated as we are invited to listen and experience these remastered sounds as a sensitive architecture of words and music.

Structured as a mental mandala, The exhibition of a dream plant the seeds of a pleasure-zen garden as a sensitive and abstract pattern. The exhibition is what is left of the distortion that once occurred, a dream as a temporary archive of what took place. Live performances of the dreams as songs composed by FM Einheit, and interpreted the musicians and the Coro Gulbenkian, were recorded both in public and private in the two amphitheatre of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the Anfiteatro ao Ar Livre, and the Grande Auditorio.

The legacy of the recordings and the ephemeral qualities of the live performances are the chemical traces in the brain: public in private (the dream apparatus) is the language of the wor(l)d. The exhibition is the dream constructed with the traces of events, as it affirms the possibility of a singular poly-author. A Polyphony where everything comes as one. The authored and written dreams are interpreted and the music composed, as these are framed and broadcasted through the shapes of so many commissioned mandalas giving the form to the songs in space as so many sensitive sculptural experiences and mental abstract images. The event becomes the trace of the memory, it questions the document, and processes these memories to generate dreams.

Acting as the libretto for the exhibition, the accompanying catalogue reprints the original dreams for the exhibition along with the reproductions of all the mandalas, as so many events to be read from a book. Inserting itself within the existing design of Gulbenkian foundation classic collection “Textos Clássicos,” consciously using the institution as material, graphic designer Virginie Gauthier shapes within the infra-design of an existing pattern this publication that encompasses, among many others, discussions with Francoise Bonardel & Myriam Gourfink, FM Einheit, Warren Neidich, or again Eduardo Terrazas along with texts by Jean-Michel Goutier, Dan Graham,  Ana Hatherly, Henri Michaux, and Paulo Pires do Vale… As an extensive array into the possibilities of the exhibition as seen through the immaterial materiality of dreams, dream making is envisaged through the material immateriality of exhibitions.