Fruit of Sleep

To sleep is a necessity. The world of dreams – the realm of the subconscious – actively seeks answers in what is otherwise subliminally known. Thoughts roam free, untied and unrestrained within sleep’s own logic and visual landscape. Imagination, the subconscious and intuition are the guiding principles that draw a navigational path in an untethered visual language.

In The Book of Sleep, Haitham Al Wardany considers the necessity of sleep in achieving a true awakening. He references the sleeper as a doer and a thinker, conflating sleep with the act of planning revolutions. Sleep is neither of the singular or collective mind, but of the social body carefully plotting change and action in the face of desolation and failed attempts.

What are the aesthetic methodologies that can take shape out of our collective state of falling in and out of sleep? Could artistic practice take flight from poesies and the contemplative into something socially effective?

The Sharjah Biennale 13 Tamawuj, explores and provokes questions around the constructed and intuitive ways of being in our environment, surroundings and community. In BAHAR, the off-site project of SB13 in Istanbul, curator Zeynep Öz focused on the keyword “crops” and used the notion of seed dormancy to reflect upon the different states of sleep, temporary arrest and periods of waiting, whether psychological, social or cultural.

This exhibition picks up on the thread of dormancy, looking at states from sleep to digestion, and our embodied experience in the shifting vocabulary of art practices that beckon for more. We see artists delve into the imaginative to harness the aesthetic, responding through their practice to urgencies and needs of the social.

This exhibition is part of Act II, the final program of Tamawuj, Sharjah Biennial 13 (SB13). Act II takes place from 16-22 October 2017 in parallel to the SB13 Beirut off-site project around the keyword “culinary,” conceived by Ashkal Alwan.