Caty Forden
Margarine.berlin presents Sleep in the exhibition hall of Kunstfabrik HB55 with 25 international artists and musicians - curated by Caty Forden and Birgit Szepanski, March 6-9, 2025
Sleep is a multidisciplinary exhibition that explores sleep as an artistic, sensory, acoustic and aesthetic motif. 20 international artists and 5 musicians show a range of perspectives on sleep: with painting, graphic art, sculpture, audiovisual works and spatial installations as well as live sound performances. An atmospheric, vibrant, poetic and sensual exhibition is coming to life at Kunsthalle HB55 in Berlin-Lichtenberg.
Sleep is something individual and at the same time something that connects all people across cultural identities, languages and countries. During sleep, the body goes limp while the subconscious processes countless impressions and thoughts from the day. When we sleep, we lose control over ourselves - over our bodies and our thoughts. When we wake up, we suddenly become aware of the gap between sleep and wakefulness. How can we get closer to the experiences of sleep and thus to ourselves? Can the discrepancy between the sleeping and the conscious self be reduced? The artists and musicians in Sleep are very familiar with entering into the unconscious terrain and re-emerging into reality, as this is part of their artistic practice. The Sleep exhibition also tells us something about how art is created. Through their individual approaches, the artists in the exhibition reflect on sleep and understand it as a space, time and threshold state. Memories of falling asleep and waking up, dream images and nightmares are captured using artistic methods. Insomnia and inner, nocturnal monologues are traced. Dream paths, desires, longings and losses are explored and brought to the surface of consciousness. The exhibition design using spotlights in unlit rooms invites the audience to resonate with the synaesthetic sound of “sleep”.
Artists
What is really there and what is simply imagined? Do sounds emerge from Lonni Wong's ceramic objects hanging from the ceiling as if from a shell? Is the hanging wooden box a mirror of an inner universe? Ian Jehle paints a wooden box with fluorescent, luminous paint and, like Wong, evokes an imaginative experience of space. Lotte Günther's hanging, moving metal sculpture also creates a dream-like atmosphere with shadows of light on the walls. Delicate charcoal drawings on a length of fabric (Sofia Dimitrova) and pieces of fabric hanging from the ceiling in a (sound) installation reflect the ephemeral, delicately sensual layers of sleep (Sam Tiussi). Birgit Wolfram and Sofia Dimitrova work with reflections, overlaps and opaque surfaces in their pencil and ink drawings: Which side of reality can you see here? In all these works of art, classifications begin to waver: what is inside and what is outside? How is an illusion created? Which spaces are an enclosure, an imagination and a sound space?
These questions about which realities we consciously and unconsciously perceive also play a key role in Caty Forden's paintings: are they remembered landscapes linked to childhood experiences, fictional worlds or visions? Sleep always harbors a great deal of uncertainty. Andreas Kramer explores this in his woodcuts, examining the forms and rhythms of sleep as a state of existence. Kramer attempts to capture something that eludes us. Hadass Gilboa is also concerned with capturing what has disappeared, including memories of her Jewish family history. She creates fluid forms of remembrance with ink drawings: They are emotionally expressive remnants of memory.
Not everything that the artists want to explore and record is tangible. Much is no more than a shadow, a sound and an echo. In parallel to her psychoanalytical reading, Paula Krause deals with the examination of the self in her paintings with fleeting, shadowy images of a female figure. Sebastian van der Borght creates countless versions of himself in his portraits drawn with ink. An interior consisting of a drawing table, notebook and drawing utensils creates a stage-like scene - the artist is absent, but at the same time present through his portraits. Layering forms a further facet of the representability of the incomprehensible. Layers reflect temporal processes. Simone Kaltenegger pursues this, she paints urban traces (weathering, graffiti) and condenses them into new layers of images. The result is a déjà-vu-like and thus dream-like effect. Paulina Berczynski's pile of mattresses made of used and precisely layered fabrics refers to the forlornness and placelessness of people. Her object is not a place to sleep, but takes it up as a question. Similarly, Birgit Szepanski arranges a fictional sleeping situation with a staged photograph in which her younger self is sleeping (photograph from 1998) and expands this into a surreal terrain with textile objects.
Elio Graziano, on the other hand, reverses the components of a painting: The empty stretcher frame, on which he hangs found objects such as papers, brushes and a poem he has written, symbolizes the uncertainty of sleep, of which there can be no realistic image. Graziano also addresses being awake between sleep phases (another element of sleep) in his poem. In cooperation with the musician Michał Krajczok, he is composing an experimental piece of music in the group “noid”. Marc Räder and Tim van den Oudenhoven show photographic works that address the uncanny nature of the night and disappearance. In Räder's sparse photographic landscape, the sleeping friend resting there can only be guessed at. A 'Suspence moment'? Van den Oudenhoven illuminates a pile of photographs taken at night with a red (darkroom) light. Sleep and wakefulness are closely related in this artistic practice. In van den Oudenhoven and Räder's work, the scenic/filmic resembles dream sequences and harbors a quietly lurking, potential danger. Chad Wright's textile work (Tufting) made of red threads symbolizes sleep as a disappearance - as an extinction. Wright associates the red with the red poppy from the film scene with the main character Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” (USA, 1939): Dorothy's journey ends at a field of poppies, whose intoxicating scent lulls her to sleep. Sometimes, while asleep, we can also discover our inner worlds and realities.
Sound performances
The five sound performances explore sleep, dreams, daydreams, consciousness and the blurred boundaries with reality - and all their connections. In each piece, the audience's auditory perception is challenged and expanded. Listening and perceiving becomes a spatial, physical and spherical experience. Together, these performances will explore alternative states of consciousness and expand the everyday perception of reality. Four loudspeakers distributed throughout the exhibition space will create an expansive soundscape.
Gałgał uses a small portable radio to send and receive different signals with the help of a homemade radio transmitter. A foray through the various radio waves, an idle state as well as randomness and spontaneity, characteristics inherent to idleness and daydreaming. Katharina Bevand leads us into a different state of perception with her modular synthesizers. She creates hallucinatory sounds that blur the boundaries between waking and dreaming. Lutz Gallmeister generates a multi-channel journey through the surreal, emotional landscapes of insomnia. He fragments the voices of people he has interviewed about insomnia. The sound tapestry of voice fragments and voice parts allows the audience to acoustically and physically feel the incoherent thought loops that arise and grow in insomnia. Samuel and Aisling will perform a sound improvisation designed to put the audience in a hypnagogic state. Shortly before waking up, we experience such a state of consciousness: thoughts are loosely and loosely strung together, they are simply linked without any logic. Samuel and Aisling want to transform this experience of 'mumbling' into a mythological experience. The WAK collective's performance aims to transform and dissolve conscious thought into a flowing dreamscape. Structured soundscapes and musical motifs are used to explore subconscious symbols of dreams.
Margarine Minis
is a selection of small-format artworks connecting to the exhibition theme Sleep. At a lower price than usual, HB55 artists offer artworks related to the Sleep exhibition. Margarine Minis are a unique opportunity to bring the special atmosphere of the exhibition into your home.