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3/3/2011

Dump Time

Verein Shedhalle, Zurich

Curated by Anke Hoffmann und Yvonne Volkart
Assistant curator Angela Wittwer

This exhibition project will be concerned with the philosophical, critical and political aspects of sleep beyond ist 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?

Events “Dump Time”

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?), in English

March 30, 9 pm
Dumped Dreams – Dance-Performance by Gluklya/Factory of Found Clothes (Natalia Pershina, 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
Stefan Panhans, Johanna Domke, Natalia Pershina, Alex Antener, Petra Elena Köhle/Nicolas Vermot
Petit-Outhenin, Ivan and Igor Buharov and the curators of the exhibition, in English

May 6, 7.30 pm
Wir schlafen nicht – Reading of the novel by and talk with Kathrin Röggla (writer, Berlin, u.a. „die alarmbereiten“,
2010), with nightly buffet and bar

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

Guided Tours:
Sunday, March 20, 3 pm with Anke Hoffmann, curator
Wednesday, March 30, 6 pm with Anke Hoffmann and Yvonne Volkart, curators
Thursday, May 5, 6 pm with Angela Wittwer, assistant curator

Artists: Alex Antener (CH), Igor und Ivan Buharov (H), Cristina David (RO), Johanna Domke (DK), Factory of
Found Clothes/Gluklya (RUS), Eiko Grimberg (D), Yolande Harris (UK/NL),
Petra Elena Köhle/Nicolas Vermot Petit-Outhenin (CH), Stefan Panhans (D), Mladen Stilinović (HR),
Anna Zaradny (PL)

Image: Stefan Panhans, "If A Store Clerk Gave Me Too Much Change," 2009. Videostill. Shedhalle Zurich.

For further information and press material please contact:
Angela Wittwer, assistant curator
aw@shedhalle.ch
++41/44 481 59 50

Opening reception: Friday March 4, 2011, 7 pm
Sound-Performance “Pink Noise/Fishing for Sound” by Yolande Harris, 8 pm
With Spring-Buffet à la Shedhalle and bar till late

Verein Shedhalle
Rote Fabrik, Seestrasse 395 - Zürich
Opening Times: Mon–Tue closed, Wed-Fri 1-6 pm, Sat–Sun 12 am–6 pm.
The Shedhalle is closed on Good Friday and Easter Monday.

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