Dr Sharon Kivland’s ‘To Dream by the Book’ vinyl playing throughout ‘Decorative Dormitories for Sleep Workers’ – Opens 27 April

Image courtesy of Sharon Kivland (Fine Art, SHU) - image of a Marconiphone from two different angles

“Dreams are of course taking us into the future. But
this future, which the dreamer takes as the present,
has been moulded by his indestructible wish into
a perfect likeness of the past.”

Decorative Dormitories for Sleep Workers
xero, kline & coma
258 Hackney Road
London E2
Opens 27 April 2017 7PM – 9PM

House of Hysteria presents their latest exhibition Decorative Dormitories for Sleep Workers, with work by Ami Clarke, Annabel Frearson, Dale Holmes, Michael Iveson, Tine Jenkins, Mark Nader, Mer Maggie Roberts, Nicola Woodham and Sharon Kivland.

Sharon Kivland’s vinyl LP To Dream by the Book will be playing throughout the exhibition on a vintage Marconiphone. A hundred readers recorded the stuff of dreams, those with a spatial quality (though perhaps this is true of the structure of all dreams), from Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud points out, comparing dream-content (what is represented) with dream-thought (which instigates the dream, turning the text of the unconscious into a play), that content and its account is ‘brief, meagre, and laconic’ in relation to the complexity and richness of the dream-thought. The dramatisation of the dream is reported, a second edition of an earlier text, but the dream is something new, in which an old wish makes its return.

At the closing event (20 May 2017, 7PM) Sharon Kivland will give a short introduction to the material of Freud’s dream book, followed by the playing of and attentive listening (Michel Foucault called Freud the most famous ear of our epoch) to the LP, which, most excitingly, will be turned over from side A to side B.

Click here for more information about this event.

Dr Sharon Kivland is a Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Find out more about Sharon Kivland’s work here.