Dump Time.
For a Practice of Horizontality
5 March–15 May 2011
Seestrasse 395
8038 Zürich
Switzerland
www.shedhalle.ch
Curators: Anke Hoffmann and Yvonne Volkart, Shedhalle
Opening Reception: Friday, March 4, 2011, 7 pm.
Audio-Sound-Performance “Pink Noise/Fishing for Sounds” by Yolande Harris
This exhibition project will be concerned with the philosophical, critical and political aspects of sleep beyond its pure biological fact.
We have become a sleepless society, we even speak of the 24 hours society. Thus, sleep represents the other side, the dark side of the daytime, with its ratio, economics, and business time. Sleep and dream have uncanny aspects, they deal with loss: loss of control, of subjectivity; they are about devotion, about becoming other. In this sense sleep is similar to the experience of passages, like death, hallucination, or being high. With these archaic and mythic dimensions, sleep represents something totally different to modern time, which is always experienced as an awakened alert time. It is something horizontal, it rejects our projections of the subject as a standing vertical “man”, like a rock. But it also contradicts our ideas of political and activist action and agency: How can sleepers change the world?
With this project, we want to think about these unproductive, senseless, and mad dimensions of sleep and their effects on our daily life. The sleeping ego cannot be controlled. Thus, we say, sleep contains recalcitrant, and critical moments. A passive way of resistance though, rather distinguished by deprivation, failure, or disobedience than revolution.
It was these critical, political and even revolutionary dimensions of sleep and dream, which were important for the surrealists, and their poetics of sleeping and dreaming. Walter Benjamin precisely recognised and described this deeply critical aspect of the surrealistic artistic practises and their political ideologies.
In our project, we refer to these critical ideas, and try to adapt them to our after modern, neoliberal 24 hours society. We want to know if the idea of sleep as opposed to the dominant fiction of the always-working subject is still an important factor? If so, how does a new poetics and esthetics of sleep look like? What about ideas of resistance? What about similar categories of hallucination, trance, ecstasy, or being high, which usually represent ideas of escape?
March 30, 7 pm
Sleep, Politics and Subjectivity – Lecture by Alexei Penzin (Moscow, philosopher and member of artist group Chto Delat/What is to be done?)
March 30, 9 pm
Dumped Dreams – Dance-Performance by Gluklya/Factory of Found Clothes (St. Petersburg) with dancers and asylum seekers from Zurich. The workshop and performance Dumped Dreams is part of the Utopian Unemployment Union Project (UUU).
March 31, 4 – 7 pm
Sleep as practice of resistance? – Open discussion about the exhibition thesis with Alexei Penzin, the artists and curators of the exhibition
May 6, 7.30 pm
Wir schlafen nicht – Reading of the novel by and with Kathrin Röggla (writer, Berlin, u.a. “die alarmbereiten”, 2010)
May 13, 7 pm
Performative Event by bolwerK, hosted by Marthe Van Dessel (artist, Antwerp), in the framework of the lecture series With With : Everything but an Artist Talk initiated by Lucie Kolb and Romy Rüegger
For further information and press material please contact:
Angela Wittwer, assistant curator: aw@shedhalle, ++41/44 481 59 50.
Programme Support: Präsidialdepartment der Stadt Zürich, BAK, Migros Kulturproduzent, Zürcher Kantonalbank
www.shedhalle.ch
Verein Shedhalle, Rote Fabrik, Seestrasse 395, Postfach 771, CH-8038 Zürich, Phone +41/44/4815950, Fax +41/44/4815951, Email: info@shedhalle.ch
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