Sleep Over

We are pleased to present “Sleep Over”, a group exhibition bringing together four artists: Lexia Hachtmann Lisa Seebach, Olga Hohmann & Jakob Petersen. The show is accompanied by a text from Olga Hohmann.

Every night she wakes up, always after exactly four hours, with a cry that could be one of pleasure or of fear, drenched in sweat. Her wet surface dries, her thoughts go round in circles. They are never good ones. Nothing thought between four and six in the morning should influence decisions made during the day, her friend P. once said. Sometimes she listens to her own heartbeat for so long that it slips out of rhythm. Arrhythmias arise in this close-knit self-observation; you are a little too close to your monster, a self-fulfilling prophecy. She lies wide awake on her back and cannot move. She feels like a giantess, her enormous paws resting on the tiny bed frame beside her gigantic body. She does not know whether hours pass or minutes. She tries to speak, but no sound comes from her mouth. She thinks of the term two-faced; she experiences it in all its literalness. It seems as if a second face were peeling away from her other, first face, flying to the ceiling and looking down at her body. To fall asleep again, she rolls her eyes far back into their sockets. She now feels she can see vaguely through her half-transparent eyelids. Looking upwards gives her an almost spiritual feeling, as if she were very close to a higher, somehow divine power. She breathes in for four seconds, holds her breath for four seconds, then breathes out for eight. She repeats this many times. Eventually she feels her autonomic nervous system settle; she returns to her body, face upon face, almost still seeing a shadow, her soul perhaps, slip back into the empty suit of skin and flesh in her bed, then slowly nods off. She knows she is almost asleep because her thoughts suddenly cease to move in straight lines and begin to dart, associative evasive manoeuvres, like a rabbit in flight. Something like this: she thinks of the soft fur of the beige rabbit with the long ears, but what is the aggressively crowing cockerel suddenly doing in her dream, a cockfight? Is it the alarm clock? Whose hands are reaching out to her? They wear a finger on every ring? That is, a ring on every finger. Or the other way around after all? The images spiral upwards, sentences are no longer fin-

Before going to sleep she took a 'Schlafstern'; she takes one every evening. Once a lover-for-one-night asks: can I have one too? They both fall asleep before, as people say, anything happens.

Sleep Over sounds like Upper East Side teenagers with loft apartments, Bellinis and mani-pedis for everyone. Like young people in onesies with feet, like giant infants. It sounds like whole bags of sweets eaten in front of the television. Like gossip. Perhaps already like alcopops, or still like romcoms? Like snide kids in pastel colours. Like deadly serious spin the bottle: afterwards the world may be different, depending on how eventful the game has been, whom you had to kiss or were not allowed to kiss. It also sounds like the first pang of homesickness, even though you are only a street corner from home, your first time with another family and its own slightly different daily rituals. The horror lives in the subtle differences. It also sounds like sleep is over: like the alarm clock ringing. Five more minutes! you shout at the parent who has pulled away your duvet. The morning begins with sudden icy cold, abruptly interrupted bed warmth, with aggression: a shock, an event. A child's first trauma is birth, psychoanalysis tells us. For children born by caesarean section, the soft, wet duvet is pulled away, the pleasantly bounded world that had already become a little cramped. Welcome to reality. But sleep over also means: sleep on it, tomorrow is another day. A soothing formula. And in fact 'the world' almost never 'looks completely different' merely because you have consciously lost consciousness for six to eight hours, because you have checked out and stayed on the side of the unconscious. Especially not if between four and six you had to think the wrong thoughts, circling, a downward spiral.

Sleep is over! shouts the duvet being pulled away. Five more minutes! you shout back; it is the child's first cry in the morning, a repetition of the trauma of birth.

Text: Olga Hohmann

Artists: Lexia Hachtmann, Lisa Seebach, Olga Hohmann & Jakob Petersen