insomnia drawings
a series of drawings made in 2008
Locate / Navigate: Exercises in Mapping
La Esquina
2008
curated by Kate Hackman
Kansas City, Missouri
SĪMURĞ
Josee Bienvenu Gallery
2019
New York, New York
Sleepless Nights
Galerie Hubert Winter
2014
curated by Abigail Solomon Godeau
Vienna, Austria
curated by_vienna: The Century of the Bed
excerpt from essay by Beatriz Column, curated by_vienna: The Century of the Bed, 2014
Based on a concept by renowned architectural historian Beatriz Colomina, international curators present exhibitions in 20 of Vienna’s leading contemporary art galleries. curated by_vienna: The Century of the Bed was held from October 2 to November 8, 2014.
Reflections on the intersections between art and architecture provided the impetus for this year’s edition of the project. Accordingly, Beatriz Colomina has written an essay titled “The Century of the Bed” for which curated by_vienna 2014 has been named. The text served as a basis for the participating galleries, and for the curators invited by the galleries. Citing a 2012 article from the Wall Street Journal which reported that 80 percent of young New York City professionals work regularly from bed thanks to today’s extensive digital technologies, Beatriz Colomina states that “a unique horizontal architecture has taken over between the bed inserted in the office and the office inserted in the bed. It is magnified by the ‘flat’ networks of social media that have themselves been fully integrated into the professional, business and industrial environment in a collapse of traditional distinctions between private and public, work and play, rest and action.” These aspects are taken up by the participating galleries and curators in manifold ways.
essay by Abigail Solomon Godeau for exhibition Sleepless Nights at Galerie Herbert Winter, 2014
"Sleepless nights, including those of insomniacs, may be singular, circumstantial, periodic, or chronic. Like pain or pleasure, the experience can be described and observed but cannot be experienced by another. This essential incommunicability makes it a permanent challenge to artistic practices. Whatever the particular manifestations of sleeplessness, the psychological and physical effects have long been the subject of literary, poetic, and artistic investigation. But unlike the artists of Romanticism or Surrealism who explored the mechanisms of dreaming and sought to invent literary or visual forms to express them, the artists represented in Sleepless Nights approach their subject from singularly nondramatic, or even occasionally physical, perspectives. Although a number of contemporary artists have taken sleep as their subject (e.g., Laurie Anderson’s 1972 Institutional Dream Series; Sophie Calle’s 1979 Les Dormeus), sleeplessness has also provided material for artistic exploration (e.g., Jeff Wall’s 1994 light box Insomnia; Sally Potter’s 2012 videotape Passion, Obsession and Insomnia). For if sleep constitutes the norm—the healthy mind in a healthy body—sleeplessness is typically a condition of disturbance, dysfunction, anxiety, even anguish. And, as is well known, sleep deprivation is one of the venerable forms of torture, notoriously employed by the US military in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Working in various media—performance, video, film, and multimedia installation—the artists featured in Sleepless Nights collectively explore the other side of dreaming, the other side of sleep. In this respect, and in keeping with our postmodern recognition of the world out of joint, they testify to a dystopian condition in which even dreaming is no longer a refuge from the grim realities of the world we inhabit."
