Bettina Cohnen, Alessandro Dal Pont, Patrick Meagher, Ivan Petrovic, Alessandro Roma, Evan Roth, Aleksandar Zograf

curated by Marco Antonini

“Hypnagogia” is a term coined by French scholar Alfred Maury (1817-1892) to define the transitional state between sleep and awakening. The word is also used to define a particular kind of dream image, often characterized by the phantasmic persistence of repetitive activities and visions that have left an impression on our subconscious. De facto engraved in our collective subconscious, the word “Snooze” evokes the common gesture of pausing the alarm clock for a few minutes, extending the blessed (or cursed) time of the day in which hypnagogic visions flourish into a virtually infinite time/space.

This exhibition converges around a studiedly anthropomorphic floor sculpture by Alessandro Dal Pont. The dream activity of Dal Pont’s minimalist character is reflected and fragmented in all the other artworks. The photographs of Bettina Cohnen and Ivan Petrovic use sleep and dream-states as mere departure points for potentially disquieting narratives to which Alessandro Roma’s rich and textured collages of murky, ambiguous landscapes provide a hypothetical background. Respectively tapping the boredom of mindless computer work and obsessive-compulsive activity, Patrick Meagher and Evan Roth’s visualizations of data processing and Aleksandar Zograf’s record of his own hypnagogic visions will extend the scope of the project by suggesting a possible interpretation of labor and daily habits as alternative dream states.