At the end of the exhibition Scatter, no turn, the GAK invites you to an artist talk with Nika Son. In her first institutional solo exhibition, the artist and musician explores insomnia and the tension between exhaustion, restlessness and desire. In rooms that are completely darkened, apart from isolated light and image elements, she examines multisensory perception and forms of manipulation that evoke states of heightened sensitivity in the face of excessive stimuli.
Annette Hans: You wrote on sleeplessness. “How someone sleeps or doesn’t sleep cannot be separated from the world we live in. In a world of constant sequences of production and consumption, sleep and its deprivation become increasingly political.” In addition to the capitalization of life, I also recall the feminist slogan of the 1970s, “the private is political”. How do you approach the topic in the exhibition?
Nika Son: Yes, that’s right, the slogan “the private is political” definitely has a relevant meaning. Sleep as a private experience is politicized in the sense that it is seen as part of a larger social system that regulates or interrupts sleep. Many people do not live according to their natural biorhythm, they adapt to the socially prescribed system or must adapt to be as efficient as possible.
Physically and psychologically, sleep and the night have been an issue for me for a very long time. On the one hand, I have suffered from severe insomnia since childhood, but at the same time I have always been a night person. These two circumstances are not necessarily easy to cope with in a world that mainly takes place during the day and seems to be accelerating and becoming shorter and shorter.
In recent years, I have increasingly felt the need to artistically deal with these topics in more depth, based on my own experiences. Reading the book Fall of sleep by Jean-Luc Nancy was certainly a decisive factor. Among other things, Nancy reflects on sleep as a borderline experience. As a retreat from consciousness, in which the boundaries between the self and the world begin to dissolve. It is precisely this dissolution that I so often long for.
Even if I can’t sleep, I still enter a different state, the relationships to time, space, and existence in general, shift. I rarely have such philosophical thoughts when I am overcome by insomnia. Instead, my thoughts revolve around their own axis, my head spins, problems, and worries, as well as trivialities, become bigger and more aggressive. Unbridgeable. At the same time, however, memories or even more fragments of memories often come up. Fragmented thoughts and images. Distorted and often in a loop.
Annette Hans and Nika Son will discuss these and other questions in the exhibition and in conversation with the guests.
Within the exhibition Nika Son: Scatter, no turn