Lucid Dreams
We sleep. Images appear in our mind’s eye. Scenes and sensations are seen, heard, felt: dreams, a creation of sleep. The unconscious speaks in symbols – as does art. Dreams and art open up transcendent spaces of healing.
Lucid Dreams engages with this universal theme, crossing boundaries of time and geography to investigate dreams in art, material culture, and new media from a multicultural perspective. It presents ancient headrests, illuminated Jewish, Islamic, and Christian manuscripts, Chinese dream stones and Japanese Zen prints together with works in a range of mediums by artists from the last three centuries, from Goya’s powerful Sleep of Reason through Surrealist visions to contemporary international and Israeli creations. All of these express humanity’s shared, never-ending desire to touch the dream and interpret it.
Celebrating the centenary of André Breton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism and inspired by his Dream Object, the exhibition leads you through a long corridor to multiple “compartments” of the unconscious. These rooms echo the complexity of the human mind and the multifaceted nature of thoughts, emotions, and memories.
Exhibition text by Adina Kamien.
The Shichecha drawings and The Moon film constitute significant core chapters in the Liquid Desert project, a work that explores the reflection of the latent contents of the collective subconscious and their intrusion into the physical realm of conscious reality.
The Shichecha series comprises 49 drawing sequences that map out patches of cognitive cataracts in the human eye, patches woven from the very essence of the human act of denial, which obliges us all to engage in an active process of forgetting.
The Moon film follows the reflection of the moon in the darkness of the night on the river near the artist's apartment in Berlin. The slowing down of the water's movement allows for the tracking of the moon's waning and waxing, which changes throughout the days of the month.
The conversation between the moon and the eye occurs in an active subconscious space where the movement of the night is awake and alive. The presence of an open and significant intermediate space between the end of one month and the beginning of another expands the boundaries of the concept of time. A time space that allows access to time that is outside of time.