Recent years have seen the erosion of sleep and dreams; Capital has sought to colonise sleep in order to more deeply collide the human subject into a 24/7 global infrastructure for continuous work and consumption. Responding to and resisting such erosion, this exhibition positions sleeping and dreaming as a radical interruption. Situating together the work of 4 artists, the first two artists interrogate our current state of fatigue and its relationship to capitalism, the following two capture the essence of dreams and propose the imaginative transformation of the world through dreaming. Whether lost in dream-worlds or delirious from sleep deprivation, the chosen works use fiction and fantasy to map out a different reality.

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The first part of the exhibition includes Basim Magdy’s latest video, ‘New Acid’, and Sarah Maher’s audio-piece ‘Amnamnesiomania’, which confronts the erosion of sleep by capital and the effects of this on the human subject. Specifically, Magdy’s work couples our current state of sleeplessness with the use of communication technology. Overlaying computer generated text-messages on top of ethereal footage of animals lazing about, the work suggests that the lived realities of the intensification our time and activity into electronic exchange are modern forms of alienation and insomnia. Maher’s piece, on the other hand, examines a fictional sleep-condition, the symptoms of which include maximising productivity, working in the middle of the night and coffee induced rashes. Ultimately, forming part of the argument that sleep is being despoiled by an economic ideology that reveres competition and individualism, and tethers personal worth to professional achievement.

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The second half of the exhibition begins with mapping out the features and content of dreams. This is sketched out in Marwan ElGamal’s stop-motion watercolour animation Mahmiya, which ruminates on the spacial, temporal and imaginative qualities of dreams. Referencing different histories, mythologies and religions, Mahmiya highlights how dreams can serve as reminders that we are embedded within larger orders and offer ways of engaging with the world outside rationalist, secular vocabularies. The exhibition closes with Ahmed AlShaer’s virtual reality piece, Hybrid Spaces and Other Objects. Crossing dreamworlds over into the physical world, the artist invites us to walk around and interact with his alternate reality. Although Hybrid Spaces is just the beginning, the work demonstrates the potential of VR to build out-of-this-world model societies and test out ways of being in them. In other words, it is the first step to dreaming better futures into being.