The dream – as an expression of our desires and fears, may convey our subconscious voices but may also serve as a tool for creativity and as a constitutive feature of mythologies – provides the underlying theme of this exhibition, which saw dreams “commissioned” from artists including Gabriel Abrantes, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Tim Etchells, Alexandre Estrela, Lee Ranaldo and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, among others. The dreams were delivered in the forms of texts or songs and subsequently subject to interpretation by the German musician F.M. Einheit, a former member of the legendary group Einstürzende Neubauten.

The recordings for the exhibition took place in Lisbon in the Grand Auditorium and in the Open Air Amphitheatre of the Gulbenkian Foundation over the course of recent months and drawing upon contributions by other leading contemporary musicians and members of the Gulbenkian Choir.

The institutional influence over this exhibition project also gets expressed through the catalogue that restores the mythical format of the “Classical Texts” collection designed by Sebastião Rodrigues for the books the Gulbenkian Foundation has been publishing since the 1960s. This thus pays homage to an aesthetic that has itself become “a classic”. In this volume, which serves at the libretto to the “polyphony” that makes up this intangible exhibition, reproducing texts and designs by various artists, such as Almada Negreiros and Ana Hatherly, among others.

This therefore becomes “an extendible panoply of the exhibition possibilities perceived from the prism of the intangible tangibility of dreams”, in the words of curator Mathieu Copeland, one of those responsible for the organisation of de Vides. Une rétrospective Emptiness. A retrospective, a radical exhibition that celebrated, in the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 2009, half a century of the “art of emptiness”, which had as its lead proponents artists such as John Cage or Yves Klein.

This sonorous exhibition traces its origins to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the site where the recordings by the German musician F.M. Einheit (in photo), among others, took place.