1000+1 Dreams
Henry Tan + Ding Yun Huang
As artists, Henry Tan and Ding Yun Huang have experimented with many techniques for making sleep sociable. Tan draws on storytelling, social critique and therapeutic experimentation using rituals inspired by Asian mythology, in search of techniques for dream and brain synchronization. Huang, a theatre artist, has brought together the transformative potential of theatrical space and the city’s soft sites of assembly, to create overnight rituals for collective sleeping and political action. As Tan puts it, “being free to dream seems like the last utopia in our daily lives.” Sleep, against the demands of modern life, remains a space of respite, like a “pause button” that buys back time for regaining courage, facing difficulties, or expansive imagination. Across 1001 nights, Scheherazade told tales to save her own life. In 1000+1 Dreams, Tan and Huang tell each other the tales they need to survive. This two-channel video installation emerged from the process of Tan and Huang attempting to synchronize their dreams between Taiwan and Bangkok. For weeks, they made video calls before they went to sleep, sharing each other’s experiences in dreams and sleep. In this intimate exchange, they discussed everything from raw experiences to memories to personal dreams. The repetitive practice shows the possibility of meeting in the dream through memory reinforcement and dream incubation through practice. Touching across space and time, the screen becomes a membrane allowing for the passage of restorative sharing.
Dead
Paul Litherland
A young man rests inside a wooden crate. In 1993, photographer Paul Litherland imagined himself “as he might be.” Thirty years later, we read this image in the long tradition that likens sleep to death—what Cressida Heyes terms an “anaesthetics of existence.” Is the crate a found version of modern-day sleep pods that make minimalist accommodations for our need to rest and to dream? Like death, the self-portraiture of sleep requires a speculative lens. And yet the light on the artist’s face is soft, a luminous veil, delicately suspended between exposure and discretion.
If artists have increasingly moved performances of durational rest into the gallery in recent years, they have also faced the troubled sleep of precarity. In Montreal, speculation, gentrification, and the scarcity of affordable housing and studio space is radically changing the encounter of art, life, labour, and rest.
We look again at Litherland’s image as part of the exhibition sub-theme “Sustainable Rests,” through which we asked artists to repurpose existing work to question what we need for a sleep that sustains creative life. The work of the artist has long been seen as indistinguishable from the work of reverie. How does the labour of sleep today—where rest often includes unpaid labour (e.g., data harvesting)—parallel the artist’s “creative” and often undercompensated labour? How does sustainability travel across sites of creation and crisis in different forms to link qualities of slowness, rest, and comfort with ecology, reuse, risk, and survival? Here, we invite you to listen to an interview with Litherland around these questions, traced on the companion map.
For more on sleep and sustainability, you can watch our roundtable “Hot Takes: Climate Change and Sleep.”
fall(sss)
Yoojin Lee
What does it mean to fall asleep, to fall into sleep? For some it is as easy as falling in love—welcome, delicious, desirable, easy. For others, the fall of sleep might be a space of risk: the fall without landing of a person with insomnia, the cataplectic dance of a person with narcolepsy suddenly at the edge of sleep, or the fall from grace that is so often the image of public sleep. “It’s my downfall, but my liberation,” Yoojin Lee reminds us. On a planet of sleepers, the gravity and grace of rest are not the same for all. Across such differences and in the paradox of risk and relief, what would you need to fall in this space? Developed from workshops in which participants experimented with languid fallings starting from an upright position (first alone with a pillow, and then in collective assemblages), in fall(sss) Lee welcomes conditions of (in)activity and (un)productivity through slowness, sloth, and sleep. The installation sets conditions for an infrastructure of falling and a sociable imaginary of our conditions of falling together. What would a world be like if it was reconstructed in the image of the falling? How do we take care of each other’s falls? What is there to hold the weight of the fall, and to soften the landing? How do we find the ground, again and again, differently or anew? Under these conditions, what then is the feeling of falling? What and who do you need to find a state of grace?
How To STay Sleepy
doux soft club, kimura byol-lemoine, Nik Forrest and Sociability of Sleep (SoS) members and collaborators
In a corner of the exhibition is a space for repose, remixed from a collaboration between SoS, the Phi Foundation’s exhibition “Yayoi Kusama: DANCING LIGHTS THAT FLEW UP TO THE UNIVERSE,” and the artist collective doux soft club’s participatory installation, bleu de lieu. Installed at the PHI for one day in December 2022, How to Stay Sleepy? began from our encounter with images of Yayoi Kusama sleeping in the world of her own work. For everyone, sleep is an every-night practice of meeting the edge of experience, of which we are all experts and always beginning again. Through her explorations at the limits of the perceptual, sensible, and real, Kusama evokes threshold feelings of the fall into and out of sleep. Her works ask how to make such liminal experiences of intensity and uncertainty both liveable and shareable. In How to Stay Sleepy?, we invite visitors to dose and experiment with the edges of sleep and its hypnagogic and hypnopompic states as they come in and out of sleep. Rearrange doux soft club’s slumberous forms to reimagine the shape of rest as you like. Meanwhile, on the video monitor, the collective discusses the place of sleep, slowness, and rest in their art practice (as part of our sub-theme Sustainable Rests). kimura byol-lemoine’s digital image Ovaries Dream models such languor, remixing a young Kusama asleep in her own soft sculpture with the napping artist Maïté Minh Tâm Jeannolin on Jeju Island. In the air is Nik Forrest’s Score for Staying Sleepy, a composition of Very Low Frequency recordings of the atmosphere at the Phi Foundation and the electronics of Kusama’s wildly popular Infinity Room. Consider: what is the sound of sleep? You will also find bedtime stories written and illustrated by the SoS team, and a sleep questionnaire intended as a meditation on the question: how to stay sleepy?
See also: https://sociabilityofsleep.ca/events/how-to-stay-sleepy/
in dreams
Dayna McLeod
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to enter someone else’s dreams? Or wished you could actualize dreams in everyday life? More and more we are asked to do the work of extracting data from our sleeping selves: through sleep apps, for example, that track, monitor, and surveil our bodies at rest. This is ostensibly for our own good but occurs too often in consumerism and for the profit of extractive industries of health, informatics, and surveillance. Screentime, for many a DIY relaxation technique, is called out as a culprit in bad sleep, extracting our attention under capitalism in an assumed active engagement antithetical to restoration. But what are the screen’s other possibilities? In a playful twist on her own professional labour as a performance and media artist, McLeod invites you into the world of her disrupted sleep, one which is riddled with parasomnias that include night terrors and sleepwalking, as previously explored in her works such as Restless (2021). In Dreams invites you to take a seat, borrowing the reclining posture of Freudian dream analysis but transposing it to the gallery, placing you in dialogue with the performance imperatives of contemporary technology and social media to put everything on display. From this position, McLeod’s dreamscape is made available via two touchscreens. On one, McLeod’s dream avatar DaynAI talks through the rough edges of AI simulation and the everyday surrealism of TikTok filters. On the other is a series of McLeod’s reanimated dreams, reworked from AI text to image generators into meditative dreamscapes. Between work and rest, exposure and intimacy, In Dreams invites you to find your own way into another’s world. In this chair, who is ultimately the dreamer?
morphai
Yiou Wang
What is a sleeping self? In our dreams we can be strangers to ourselves—it was me but not really me—so that the sleeping self can be deeply uncanny, in Freud’s sense of the familiar strange. Yiou Wang’s Morphai explores her own relationship to her sleeper self by creating a sleep avatar via technologies that promise a glimpse of sleep’s other side. Wang notes that, “[w]hen you are asleep, your dreamed self takes another form—like the human shape sent to dreamers by Greek god of dreams, Morpheus—the morphai.” Wang fabulates traces of prosumer, biometric captures of sleepers—biosensor data of the somnambulant movements of anonymized “sleep performers” (Dayna McLeod and Laurie-Anne Gosselin) that become the hypnotic gestures of an animated data-driven avatar. Visitors are invited to witness this shared dream through the unfolding movements of the avatar on screen. At the same time, Wang retains a delicate mystery within the black box—of sleep, of technology—of a curtained bed, to screen and protect the sleeping performer within. The result brings the dreamed avatar into the waking world. An encounter that hovers in between sleep states, Morphai refutes the foundational split that grounds the philosophy of Western modernity, which characterizes the realm of sleep as an absence of conscious mind or agency, and dream life as unreal and inferior to the rationality of day. For Wang, “Morphai is not only a digital avatar but ultimately it is an attempt to encapsulate our dreamed self as an alter ego parallel to our waking self. It exists outside the western individualism that recognizes a person as having a body and a soul…The avatar, as not just a symbol but an output of morphai, lands in a strange spot of consciousness, in a strange and performative realm of mind-body synchronicity.”
Radio Insomnia
Anabelle Lacroix + Nicolas Montgermont
Insomnia is a state of exception that everyone experiences at one time or another: from shift workers to parents at the mercy of their baby’s brand-new rhythms, from anxious souls to “revenge bedtime procrastinators” and night owls. In a crisis, the night is the first time to be sacrificed on the altar of respectable sociability and chrononormativity, endlessly associated with deviance and bad behaviour. In the search for good sleep, there are few propositions for cultivating nocturnal wakefulness and its necessary counterpart, daytime somnolence, that don’t see this as a perversion of human nature itself. But for those of us for whom night holds sleep at a distance, by will or by helpless submission, Radio Insomnia sings a song of the political and poetic aspects of wakefulness and insomnia. Anabelle Lacroix and Nicolas Montgermont have assembled the sounds of sleep as both an ongoing listening station for the duration of InSomnolence, and as an ephemeral and live event over two nights (July 7–8, 2023): online and over the air waves both nights, and an in-person nuit blanche at the Agora on July 8. Radio Insomnia is a curated program of sound works drawn from an open call—interviews, music, experimental noise, roundtables, storytelling, and more—that deal with the theme of insomnia and night-time: wakefulness, awakening, night work, the specificities of radio and night listening, chrononormativity, solitude and isolation, intimacy, the experience of dilated time, the reappropriation of nocturnal time in public space. What is the potential of night-time radio when wakefulness is embraced rather than endured? Can we listen “with” insomnia, rather than fight against it for productivity? Why loosen the grip on insomnia when we can tighten our ear?
For more information on the overnight editions, see the exhibition website and listen at https://insomnia.radio.fm.
The Labour of Sleep
Ilona Gaynor
If Ilona Gaynor’s video The Labour of Sleep unfolds in a so-called “real-time duration” of the “recommended daily allowance” by the National Sleep Foundation of eight uninterrupted hours of sleep, the actual experience of watching a video of this length might well feel closer to the unruly and elastic warp of sleep’s many rhythms. Through her research practice that seeks to create conditions to image and make visible what often remains hidden from view, Gaynor works collaboratively with organizations, using design practices as the basis for visual storytelling of how the world is ordered. Here, she turns to the hotel industry to consider the “knock-on effect that capitalism has on sleep: socially, culturally and economically, by focusing specifically on an industry in which sleep dominates its form of revenue.” The labour of hotel workers, the discrete preparation of spaces of temporary rest, is brought into view by Gaynor’s film. Workers are also hidden from view, but it is through their eyes that we navigate spending the night at the hotel. The Labour of Sleep thus overlays in one site Robert Owens’s famous nineteenth-century slogan: “Eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest.”
The hotel’s peculiar, if common, sleep environment often causes the “first night effect,” poor sleep the first night in a strange place, a specific insomnia facilitated by the intensity of global travel and the mobility of contemporary work. Business travelers are a mainstay of hotels; one worker trying to sleep in a bed prepared by another. For sleepless guests, Gaynor has made a video you might find on any flat screen in any anonymous multinational hotel chain, but with the express goal of putting you to sleep. Here, sleep and labour meet under the sign of duration and endurance, temporalities we experience too rarely in gallery environments.
The Lantern
Natalie Fizer, Richard Sommer, Henry Tan + Ding Yun Huang
Where once the sun and moon would synchronize us to their rhythms of light and dark, electrification has contributed to the dwindling of shared night experiences. The Lantern is an experiment in ritualizing the liminal state between wakefulness and dreaming as a collective co-composition, a new ceremony across different temporalities of sleep. Based on the strange marriage of mythological figures, The Lantern is a shrouded time portal aimed at fostering a collective oneiric experience.
In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, Naga is a mythological figure who dwells in the watery underworld, guarding treasures and possessing great wisdom. Naga represents the cycle of life and death, and is revered as a symbol of power, protection, and transformation. Meanwhile, in Ancient Greece, the abaton—the innermost chamber of the Greek Asklepion complex—is where visitors would sleep collectively to “incubate” prophetic dreams and seek healing from “incubus” spirits, leaving behind the testimonies of their encounter. These ritualistic and shared scenes of retreat and restoration promote shared healing and the collective dreaming of the future into being. Across these traditions, The Lantern confabulates a ritual for today in a folded, penumbral chamber. Visitors are encouraged to ascend to the mezzanine, choose a soft sleep-induction charm spun from the recollected dreams of student storytellers, and gather in the thresholds of The Lantern.
This project was made in collaboration with the following students in a graduate seminar at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture at the University of Toronto: Bianca Mori-Maurelli, Maxen Wang, Lensa Baker, Chanel Chin, Haseena Doost, Jannace Bond, Matthew Jin, Melisa Mahecha, Nashaat Rahman, Kelly Tse, Michaela Tsvetkova, Suzan Ye Htwe, Dara Abu Khajil, Harir Goodarznia, Caleigh MacDonald, Julia Miclaus, Olivia Loncar-Bartolini, Yipeng Huang, Ho Yeung Miu, Eric Wang, Ariana Fernandez Chesquin, Nikolas Giatzoylou, Michelle Ng, Thomas Tencer.
Untitled (extract from a work in progress, Oneiric Lights)
Manon De Pauw, in collaboration with Pierre-Marc Ouellette
Music: Nicolas Bernier; Performers: Karina Champoux and Philippe Dépelteau; Direction, camera, editing: Manon De Pauw; Additional camera: Vickie Grondin and Sébastien Huot
“You are getting sleepy,” the hypnotist intones. In the movies, the world would begin to waver before a character’s eyes. Manon De Pauw is an artist whose works often occupy that ambiguous boundary of in-betweens—between the here and there, the material and immaterial, the fixed and fluid— that is also the zone of edges and thresholds. These borderlands of sleep are known as the states of hypnagogia (in the falling asleep) and hypnopompia (in the waking from sleep), bracketing the distinction between sleep and wakefulness with intensely creative confounds where one world can bleed into another, as when the siren in a dream turns out to simply be an alarm clock. In this playful and embodied installation, De Pauw and her collaborator Pierre-Marc Ouellette brings us to the place where sleep starts to pull apart perceptions of the everyday world. When the familiar starts to stretch into the strange, what shifts in our way of orienting to the world? In lucid dreaming—the ability that some sleepers have of becoming self-aware inside their own dreams—there are tricks and techniques, such as pinching yourself, to test if you have crossed the threshold into sleep. Here, De Pauw and Ouellette pinch the world instead and leave you to explore the aftereffects of such distortions.
Variations in Zzz
Sandra Huber, Maude Trottier, Albertine Thunier, Michèle. Barcena-Sougavinski
The Things That Make The Sleeper
Albertine Thunier, Michèle Barcena-Sougavinski + SoS team
The Abecedary of Sleep
Sandra Huber [English] + Maude Trottier [French]
In this space, we invite you to meditate on what you know of sleep. InSomnolence is the work of an interdisciplinary research-creation project and team, the Sociability of Sleep (SoS), who for two years has sought ways to speak across different ways of knowing sleep. We do not believe that there is a singular perfect sleep, but rather that, when it comes to rest, we must care for differences of rhythms, needs and desire. Telling each other how and why we rest and what we want from sleep, we developed the two techniques for composing (with) sleep) shared here. The Things That Make The Sleeper is a visual portrait of many members of the SoS research team for whom sleep is both a professional and personal interest. Many of us struggle with non-normative sleep—at times disturbing, at times fascinating—and we have sought to cultivate an attitude of care and curiosity towards our varied and taken for granted habits and adaptations. We asked everyone to bring something that represents, explains, or otherwise materializes their relationship to sleep, or their sleeper subjectivity: how can we know you through an element of your sleep? Our answers, documented photographically by Albertine Thunier, are transformed here into an archive of slumber by Michèle Barcena-Sougavinski. The Abecedary of Sleep is a creative response to one of our main forms of inquiry: a two-year series of public Sleep Salons pairing researchers from different fields around subjects such as sound, trauma, dreams, performance, histories, and more. Writers Sandra Huber and Maude Trottier re-imagine the Salons through a subjective glossary of sleep; a conversation that, like sleep, is never over and done. You can read their texts here and watch the salons on our website.
Official photography by Paul Litherland (Studio Lux).