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Waking and Sleeping. Dreams, 1979

The Dreaming series, which started in 1978, results from my interest in the commonplace and trivial as an area of artistic penetration. The programmatic artificiality of art as proposed earlier can be seen through some trivial and everyday actions such as eating, sitting or breathing. Dreaming is also an attempt at artistic formalization with the commonplace and everyday life serving as building blocks. It becomes unusual and ambiguous when seen in its three aspects that can be logically inferred from that “show”. Firstly, it is the simple action of falling asleep and dreaming, which is in this case accelerated and induced with a pharmaceutical preparation. Dreams are then the essence of the inner life of that stage of the show and are available only to the sleeper. The second aspect is the visual aspect, that is, the “outer” layer of the dreaming process which is available to the audience. This outer layer is represented by the participants i.e. the witnesses and objects of the show at the gallery. The third aspect is something that can be described as an attempt at materialization or to creation of an equivalent of an unreal dream or in other words to produce a fictional document. Of course, l realize that such a process is not perfect and comprehensive. This commentary and the comments during the show are provided to correct its defects. This shows us how our inner life is closely linked to ourselves and that as such it is untranslatable. This represents an extreme example of the individuality of our experiences which belong to us only and which are untranslatable. Our ability to transmit messages is limited to those things that represent what is common in our social consciousness, that is, external appearances and external materializations. However, all the dreamed realities of the individual exist only as an idea. This idea, on the one hand, emphasizes the importance of real consciousness while, on the other hand, being pretence it adds the extreme values of individual consciousness to the area of social consciousness.

Natalia LL, 1979

Translated by Małgorzata Możdżyńska-Nawotka