The Exhibition of a Dream

Underscoring the complex beauty inherent in the genesis of a dream, the exhibition proposes what it would mean to create a mental image within the mind of those experiencing these mediated dreams, and thus opening these to new interpretations.

German musician, composer and performer FM Einheit (Dortmund, 1958) was invited to compose sixteen songs based on the dreams written by Gabriel Abrantes, Robert Barry, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, FM Einheit, Alexandre Estrela, Tim Etchells, Susie Green, Karl Holmqvist, David Link, Pierre Paulin, Emilie Pitoiset, Lee Ranaldo, Lætitia Sadier, Susan Stenger and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Manifestation of desires and fears, vehicles for voices from the unconscious and fragments of mythology, the dreams of these artists, filmmakers, playwrights, poets, and writers were performed by FM Einheit who surrounded himself with musicians Volker Kamp, Robert Poss, Susan Stenger, Erika Stucky, Saskia von Klitzing and the singers of the Gulbenkian Choir. The dream interpretations were ultimately recorded live, both publicly and privately, in the two amphitheatres of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the Open-Air Amphitheatre and the Grand Auditorium.

These compositions are ultimately reconfigured spatially through the forms of mandalas – patterns drawn, painted, etched, as diagrams and scores, by José de Almada Negreiros, Philippe Decrauzat, Myriam Gourfink, Peter Halley, Olivier Mosset and Eduardo Terrazas. Performed one after another, each song is interpreted into space through a mandala, with each of the sixteen songs generating a distinct configuration that forms a succession of sensitive sculptural experiences and abstract mental images.

The mandala (the ephemeral) and the mental (the immaterial) provide a framework for understanding the sensory experience of an exhibition in which everything remains off-screen. Found across multiple cultural and spiritual traditions, and later echoed in Jungian thought, the mandala operates here as a structure for projection. The exhibition becomes a dream environment where what is to be seen must be read, and what is to be heard must be imagined.

The Exhibition of a Dream sows the seeds of a Zen pleasure garden according to an abstract, sensitive pattern. The exhibition is the dream. Together, they construct one another from traces, fragments and events. The unity formed by all these dreams, written, interpreted, performed, and ultimately spatially fused, asserts the possibility of a single, multiple author.

An exhibition by Mathieu Copeland

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