What if I fall asleep before it ends
2-Channel video Installation | 12’05” | 2021

Humans have projected their dreams, visions, fears, and fantasies onto celestial bodies since forever. Moon, Sun, and a Star are gathered around a steadily spinning flat-Earth table to discuss some human-related matters. This unusual plenum unfolds as a quarrel between rationalism (the Moon) and fun (the Sun, supported by the Star’s poetic insertions), it might be a goodnight story for children about goodnight stories for children, or it might be a dream. In the actual exhibition space,we see the plenum screen in the reflection of a mirror, another act of projection that lends depth to the image and lets the animated figures float. Behind it is a tall vertical screen on which a child’s hand assembles a rocket from LEDs, that will later take off and explode.
„What if…“ is a well known trope of speculative fiction. Thinking the relationship of humans to all things heavenly through imagined perspectives from the future and from outer space, is indeed a speculative undertaking. It brings us back down to Earth, into the middle of the madness called the 21st century: the neoliberal space race, „a species called entrepreneurs that occupied the entire planet“, the excesses of an elitist fine art scene, and their structural kinship in human exceptionalism and methodological individualism. These entanglements culminate as five chosen artists („the best“) are put onto a private spacecraft, which later explodes. The explosions, of course, are painted as the timeless art humans had been waiting for, and replicas are marketed successfully ever since. None of it seems too exaggerated, given that 2021 has seen several tycoons fly into space in the middle of a global pandemic, and open calls for artist-manned space trips are already being circulated by the industry.
„What if I fall asleep before it ends?“ might also reflect the viewer’s deep-seated fear of not understanding the work of art, perhaps having left behind childhood’s openness to nonsense, adding to the layer of self-reflectivity that weaves through the work. If you do drift off to slumber after a long day, don’t be surprised if the plenum continues, relax and listen to the Sun: dreaming makes the story even better. (Text by Ernest Ah)