The Screen Under My Eyelids
2020
3 digital videos, 1 stereo sound, 1 inkjet print on wallpaper with spotlight, 2 vinyl texts
What if there would be no more night?
Over the centuries, we have constructed life around two temporalities: the duality of day and night. This can be traced back to the rotation of the earth, which—like any other form of life—has given human beings a clear rhythm. The active day was followed by the night, characterized by sleep, rest, celebrations and other activities that were not possible during daytime. However, the night disappears: opacity, shadow and darkness are fading away. Contemporary society is constructing a round-the-clock operating world leading to a continuous form of time in which the separations between activity and rest, work and leisure, professional and private life eradicate. Insomnia is revealed to us during impasses, but also as a consequence of perpetual work and thus, a response to the omnipresent possibility of visibility.
The Screen Under My Eyelids brings together works that explore the mental and social states of insomnia. Conceived with digital video, audio and inkjet prints, the exhibition investigates a temporal form between standstill and movement. The works echo the continuous shape of time in an insomniac condition, as well as a world in a perpetual functionality. Light in this sense has become an aesthetic vector for mechanisms that structure contemporary society. One of the works shown in the exhibition is a found video of a mirror satellite (Znamya 2.5, an experiment in the 90s) that has the function of deflecting the sunlight towards the Earth. It evokes the ambiguous desire to extend the diurnal temporality to a sempiternal day.
Paula Abalos, Sabrina Asche, Anselm Benedikt Hötte, Prof. Joachim Blank, Prof. Dr. Beatrice von Bismarck, Wut Chalanant, Jennifer Demmel, Michael Ehritt, Elizabeth Gerdeman, Andreas Giesecke, Andrea Garcia Vasquez, Mandy Gehrt, Florian Krämer, Mario Kühne, Judith Lavagna, Bernadette Keating, Adrian Kleinlosen, Marie-Eve Levasseur, Kati Liebert, Michael Ludwig, Carsten Möller, Nico Nice, Dr. Michael Ohme, Tobias Richter, Max Schneider, Aaron Shoichet, Simon Thiou, Halle 14 Zentrum für Zeitgenössische Kunst and Sheila Hugh Mackay Foundation.
