SLEEP 7

Art for sleepers, art by sleepers and art as sleep.

Sleep is a refuge. The English romantic poet William Wordsworth called sleep the “blessed barrier between day and day.” We want to inhabit this barrier as something arising out of nature but that is also deeply built-up out of other aspects of life. It is these that form the grounds for the experimental work of the sleep series.

Sleep is a refuge from the work of having a subjectivity, of having to endure, being alert, to respond. But it is also an unexplored aesthetic domain. We are still sensually and metabolically “on” when asleep, just working in other registers. An aim of these projects is to subtly dialogue with these capacities. The sleep series works with an expanding domain of aesthetics through the capacities of the unconscious body. It revises the philosophical cut between the mental subject on the one hand and the somatic object on the other. 

Sleep is also a refuge since it is increasingly being discussed as a human right in its own terms, not simply as a sub-set of the right to private and family life. Sleep deprivation is a technique of torture but it is also a crucial function of our permanently alert economies. Finding the differential arrangement of sleep in a society is one way of understanding and reimagining it.

In the context of the epidemic, sleep comes under increasing pressure for many people. We assert the idea that sleep can have its own modes of aesthetics and that art can address itself to them in a way that enhances sleep’s capacity of refuge.

This project is the fourth in a series of works, Sleep 48 (Linz, 2018), Sleep 79 (Taipei, 2018), Sleep 1237 (New York City, 2019) that build on the idea of an aesthetics of sleep developed in Matthew Fuller’s book, How to Sleep, the art, biology and culture of unconsciousness (Bloomsbury, 2018). These projects transpose art into sleep, and everyday and scientific sleep actions into active aesthetics.

Programme
An installation composed of 20 beds with 1.5m distancing are open for people to sleep in during museum opening hours.

November 2-6 at 2-4pm
Readings for Sleeping: A series of siesta matinées exploring the relationship between text and sleep.
Nov 2: Tawanda Appiah reads Black Sunlight by Dambudzo Marechera.
Nov 3: Parvin Ardalan reads No Friend But the Mountains by Behrouz Boochani.
Nov 4: Ansar Bakir reads Conclusion to the Chilcot Enquiry conducted by Sir John Chilcot.
Nov 5: Ida Börjel reads The Annual Report.
Nov 6: Jeuno Kim reads The Book of Deuteronomy addressed to Moses.

November 7-8 at 4:16pm-7:29am
Night of Sleep: An overnight performance lasting from Sunset to Sunrise.  For the duration of 15 hours and 13 minutes Sainkho Namtchylak performs 7x7 for 9, inspired by Bordo Tödol (The Tibetan Book of the Dead).                                              

All programs are streamed on the Paris- based independent artist radio station p-node.

During the week, sleep tea concocted by artist Cecilia Germain is served. For Night of Sleep, sleep food and Schlafgutbier 4 by local craft brewer, Rocket Brewing are on hand to be appreciated.

Shu Lea Cheang is an artist and filmmaker whose work aims to re-envision genders, genres, and operating structures while engaging in social interface and open network constructs. In 2019 she represented Taiwan with 3x3x6, a mixed media installation at the Venice Biennale 2019. Cheang is currently at work on UKI, a viral alt-reality scifi cinema.

Matthew Fuller is Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London and an author working in media theory, software studies, cultural theory, and contemporary fiction. 

The activist network METOOD (MFK, Metood För Konstnärlig frihet) works from within institutions, towards a situated politics of the body. Voicing a ”we” that comes across with carnivalesque thrust, METOOD previously produced The Violence and Social Care Inspectorate at Malmö Konsthall (2019).