'Ominous Tales of a Dreaming Wrinkle', Group Show at Scherben, Berlin

Wrinkles on a white lab coat fold into themselves,
cover blind spots the naked eye often neglects and hug one another tightly. They briefly brush against each other and rush along about their day, scratching the surface of their neighboring menace, touching each other’s fingertips. Carefully, meticulously placed they frame a beautiful calligraphy
that’s stitched onto someone’s right chest pocket.

The name spelled is not relevant. Inside there was a little black notebook waiting patiently to be read. It contained a detailed, explicit, sharp-witted list of dreams, all organized in alphabetical order, starting from A to Z and then back again, moving constantlly on a perfect loop.
Some of the dreams were more malleable than the rest, soft and tender.
You could talk them into moving up on top of the list.
Others were stubborn, quite hard to reason with but always fun to be around.

The life of a wrinkle is for sure not an easy one.
Constantly looked down upon, forced to face the flatness of this world, the fear of the vacuum,
the panic attacks becoming obsolete in the face of sharply dressed young professionals, or the ironed-out details of any legally binding contract breathing down your neck. It used to ride on a shiny red bike, it used to stroll through the dirty streets of Athens and steal ice-cream cones from passersby. It was summer, so the heat was just unbearable for a wrinkle living in the big concrete city.

But even though it was predisposed, genetically speaking, towards a certain kind of materiality when it came to his wrinkled skin, it still couldn’t get enough of the sun. It could just spend hours and hours just laying on top of the grass, stretching on an old tin-roof and enjoying the sun peircing through as if it were made out of thin tissue paper. Not aware of the impact that was going to have on its future life, it decided to go into the lab coat decorating business. Folded together, niches on an old government building, safeguard public records of all sorts.

The question is this: what could the dream journal of a wrinkle contain?
Precipitately, falling, rolling around, the secret stories of the wrinkle are essential.
They breathe, they mediate and operate as a facsimile for life. But this wrinkle was quite uncommon. Not accustomed to the mundane world of textile decoration,
it aimed higher than to be stuck in a peril of having to accompany some old fart around, framing someone else’s name on a forgotten nametag, supporting someone else’s breast, hiding behind their back, lurking under their underwear.

This wrinkle was special,
because this wrinkle took it upon itself to dream of bigger things, of greater things.
In a societal structure of absolute dreamless behavior, where every wrinkle simply does as they are told, this one felt obsolete, isolated, secular. Forever overshowed by its distant cousin,
the fabulous fold, which had somehow managed to allude capture from banality
and enter the field of aesthetic contemplation with greater ease and grace,
wrinkles were a mere smudge on the face of high art and culture.

What could a wrinkle possible dream of and what could this very specific, in a sense almost singular, wrinkle, allow itself to imagine whilst asleep?

Scratching, digging, clawing its way to the top, it smacked its pretty little head against the surface of a dress. The wrinkle did everything it could to fall asleep. Sleep deprevation just made the bags under its eyes look even bigger and puffier and that was not a good look to have. The wrinkle dreamt of standing up for itself, straightening up and going outside into the real world.

Dreaming is supposed to a be free and universal, a state of being-in-the-world defined by its accecibility.
A context shaped by its inevitability. An old billiard table was waiting behind the bar, whispering to a group of tired construction workers wearing beautiful woven vests, who had stopped on their way home from work after their last shift for a quick drink. It whispered a bunch of rumours about machines of the dream-institution, some device that could possibly turn out to be a game changer, a means of better understanding the ways of instituting dreamfulness and dreamlessness alike. The wrinkle, omnipresnet as always, started to get its hopes up.

Some day the dreaming institutions will become sites of unimportance. A place where wrinkles will no longer have to work, where sneaking on the surface of a white lab coat will not be a concidered a great priority, something to write home about. Means of instituting are definitive, messy, translucent and destructive. Unable to be jailed the form of an institution will always remains transformative, ever-chnaging, silent and precise. The biggest threat to the dreamful wrinkle is the process of rendering, depicting, projecting, re-presenting.

It opened its eyes and stood up; as much of course as a tired wrinkle is able to stay up. The following thought quickly overpowered its mind as it was making its way to see another patient on top of the shiny lab coat: dreaming, just like living, should be taken very serisously. It should be nothing short of a full-time job;
one that requires years of training, qualifications, experience and patience. The consequences of failing are devestating, thought the wrinkle and went on with the rest of its appointments.

Catastrophe

ON DREAMING INSTITUTIONS: TOOLS AND ADAPTATIONS

Charlotte Beradt’s “The Third Reich of Dreams”
is a collection of short texts documenting the dreams of people living under Nazi rule in Germany. Beradt docu- mented the dreams of people, both Jewish and not, dating from 1933 until 1939. Her work showcases the impact and intrusion of a totalitarian machine that reached deep into the dreamscape. The last chapter includes the stories of those who used their dreams to resist the Nazi regime:
“I dreamed that it was forbidden to dream, but I did anyway.”

Virgina Woolf ’s “Orlando”, originally published in 1933, touches upon questions of dreaming and instituting on a numerous occasions: “By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis wak- ing that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life–(and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).”

20.5.22 — 5.6.22

Beth Collar, Ellen Yeon Kim, Unfamiliar Arrangements (Boaz Yosef Friedmann, Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir, Sophie Isabel Urban & Simon Wienk-Borgert)

Curated by Haris Giannouras

Scherben

Berlin Beth Collar Boaz Yosef Friedmann Ellen Yeon Kim Germany Haris Giannouras Karólína Rós Ólafsdóttir Scherben Simon Wienk-Borgert Sophie Isabel Urban Unfamiliar Arrangements

'Ominous Tales of a Dreaming Wrinkle', Group Show at Scherben, Berlin

'ABSINTHE', Group Show Curated by PLAGUE at Smena, Kazan

'Pupila' by Elizabeth Burmann Littin at Two seven two gallery, Toronto

'Auxiliary Lights' by Kai Philip Trausenegger at Bildraum 07, Vienna

'Inferno' by Matthew Tully Dugan at Lomex, New York

'Зamok', Off-Site Group Project at dentistry Dr. Blumkin, Moscow

'Dog, No Leash', Group Show at Spazio Orr, Brescia

'Syllables in Heart' by Thomas Bremerstent at Salgshallen, Oslo

'Out-of-place artifact', Off-Site Project by Artem Briukhov in Birsk Fortress, Bi

'Gardening' by Daniel Drabek at Toni Areal, Zurich

'HALF TRUTHS', Group Show at Hackney Road, E2 8ET, London

'Unknown Unknowns' by Christian Roncea at West End, The Hague

'Thinking About Things That Are Thinking' by Nicolás Lamas at Meessen De Clercq,

‘Funny / Sad’, Group Show by Ian Bruner, Don Elektro & Halo, curated by Rhizome P

'Don’t Die', Group Show at No Gallery, New York

'Almost Begin' by Bronson Smillie at Afternoon Projects, Vancouver

'I'll Carry Your Heart's Gray Wing with a Trembling Hand to My Old Age', Group Sh

'hapy like a fly' by Clément Courgeon at Colette Mariana, Barcelona

'Fear of the Dark' by Jack Evans at Soup, London