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AB Kusama 107
Photo: Adil Boukind

How to Stay Sleepy – Dissections: Yayoi Kusama

  • Event
  • Contemporary Art
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PHI Foundation 465 Saint-Jean Street
Education Room (SS01)

Saturday, December 10, 2022 From 10 AM to 6 PM

Free Reservations required

To participate in the How to Stay Sleepy event, please reserve a spot by contacting Daniel Fiset at [email protected]. The experience will also be accessible to people who have tickets to visit the Yayoi Kusama exhibition on December 10, 2022.

What happens in the aftermath of infinity? This is the question that guides research collective The Sociability of Sleep in their exploratory intervention, presented as part of Dissections: Yayoi Kusama. For the occasion, the collective will activate doux soft club’s participatory installation, bleu de lieu.

Again and again, we encounter images of Kusama resting and sleeping in the world of her own work. For each of us, sleep is a nightly practice where we meet the edge of experience, in which we are all experts, and that is always beginning again. Through her art, her techniques of repetition, and her explorations at the edges of perception, the sensible and the real, Kusama provokes that threshold feeling of the fall into sleep, when the world shifts around us and anything becomes possible. Much of her work and life has explored the question of how to make such experiences of intensity and uncertainty both liveable and shareable.

In How to Stay Sleepy, visitors will be invited to experiment with their own experiences at the edge of sleep, the hypnagogic state and the remix of dreams, imagination and the everyday. Guided by The Sociability of Sleep’s team of expert artists, sleep scientists, and fellow sleepers, we invite you to extend the edge of infinity as you step out of Kusama’s world. You may choose how you wish to take part: through the Kusama sleep questionnaire, by recording your sleep rests and remixing the onsite soundscape, by napping alongside the action, opening up the infinite angles of sleep.

Dissections is an ongoing event series presented in conjunction with our exhibition program. Through each of its iterations, Dissections aims to generate interdisciplinary dialogue and foster a renewed engagement with contemporary art through a multiplicity of perspectives.

How To Stay Sleepy is made possible in part by the New Frontiers in Research Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

The activity is presented in French and English.

Biographies

The Sociability of Sleep
The Sociability of Sleep is an interdisciplinary research-creation project exploring the epistemologies and equities of sleep. We are interested in both the everyday and the exceptional experiences of sleep and its disturbances. In sleep, we all become radically vulnerable in a way that requires social forms of care: individuals are experts of their somatic experience, and yet access to the sleeping self relies on the perception of human and technological others. How might exploring a sleeper subjectivity—the quotidian ways we navigate time, space, ourselves, and others—help us rethink and reanimate the sociability of sleep itself? From the cyclical rhythms of productivity and rest, to shiftwork to overwork; from racial and gendered inequities to cultural alterities; from the stigmatization and performance of fatigue to the medicalization of sleep; from the ubiquity of sleep to its the privacy and invisibility; from individual experiences of sleep and dreams to the normativity of the sleep industrial complex—these are some of the manifestations of the social lives of sleep.
sociabilityofsleep.ca

doux soft club
doux soft club is an artistic and curatorial collective reuniting the practices of duo Pénélope et Chloë, Mariane Stratis, and Marion Paquette. The four artists met while completing their B.A.s in visual and media arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal (2012). It is through numerous exchanges and a mutual desire to see their practices evolve together that doux soft club was founded in 2017. Moved by cohesion, they see the regrouping of their plural visions as an essential part of their process. The club is an adaptable structure that invites all members to collaborate in the sharing, exchange and interinfluence of ideas. doux soft club’s work has been seen in Canada in the context of solo exhibitions at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art (Montreal, 2022), the Darling Foundry (Montréal, 2023), AXENÉO7 (Gatineau, 2019), Verticale (Laval, 2021 and 2019), GHAM & DAFE (Montréal, 2018) and in group exhibitions at the Campus de la Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris (2021), Musée Ambulant (Québec, 2021), Arprim (Montréal, 2020) and Puce N.5 (Saint-Armand, 2019). The collective was nominated for the Plein Sud Award (Longueuil, 2020) and has received a research, creation and exploration grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (2020). 

The collective is interested in an aesthetics of softness, which brings forward a rehabilitation of the senses through notions of care, empathy, and resilience. Doux-soft is understood by the artists as the capacity to be amazed by the banal. This capacity is closely tied to the contexts through which the works appear, and allow for a poetics of the everyday to emerge in their works. Their projects investigate, dialogue with, and take on a multiplicity of forms: exterior interventions, websites, artist books, exhibitions, and performances. In this way, their performative work allows them to animate the sculptural objects they create, revealing their sensorial and sensuous characters. These manipulations, documentations and exhibitions seek to transform the viewer’s experience through a series of slippages. By constantly revisiting each project’s potential, the club reflects on the polymorphic, lively and permutable aspects of their production. Through their process, a collective intelligence emerges, feeding their research and production: inter-influence, determine how something is influenced, copy and paste, throw a ball around, catch it, and throw it back. 
douxsoftclub.com
@douxsoftclub  

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