Pirelli HangarBicocca presents "The Dream Machine is Asleep", from 15 February to 22 July 2018, the personal exhibition of Eva Kot'átková, curated by Roberta Tenconi, conceived as a path of images and words, a labyrinthine and surreal world that invites you to produce dreams and develop the imagination, highlighting individual fantasies, fears and challenges of contemporary society.
For the exhibition "The Dream Machine is Asleep" Eva Kot'átková has developed an unprecedented and immersive project where existing works are combined with new productions, including installations, sculptures, out-of-scale objects, collages and performative moments. Starting from the vision of the human body as a machine, a large organism whose functioning requires revisions, regeneration and rest, and from the idea of sleep as a moment in which new visions and parallel worlds are created through dreams, the exhibition explores our projections and the most intimate thoughts, anxieties and disorientation of contemporary living.
The exhibition itinerary brings together a wide selection of works, including the installation and video Stomach of the World, 2017 and the sculpture series Theater of Speaking Objects, 2012, as well as new projects, such as the installation The Dream Machine is Asleep , 2018 that invades the space with a gigantic bed, a dreamlike generator of ideas and stories. The entire exhibition is conceived as an organism which, through programmed performances, comes to life and is inhabited by figures who roam the space activating the works with simple static actions, with more complex choreographies or through extemporaneous oral narrations.
At the heart of “The Dream Machine is Asleep” is the homonymous installation, a gigantic bed at the base of which is what the artist defines as an office for the creation of dreams. With this work, Eva Kot'átková continues her research on the systems that regulate our lives, juxtaposing them with images from the universe of childhood to make up for the lack or loss of imagination. Imagine that people are no longer able to dream – she recites the artist's invitation to look for young collaborators to create an archive of dreams available to visitors to the Milanese exhibition. Not only during the night but also during the day people lack imagination. This is your job in this job: to provide dreams and ideas to all those who spend a sleepless and dreamless night or those who experience monotonous working days with strict schedules and no unexpected events. Become engineers (builders) of other people's dreams, become dream purveyors
Eva Kot'átková
Eva Kot'átková (Prague, 1982) lives and works in Prague. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, at the San Francisco Art Institute and at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. You have exhibited in various institutions, including: Haus 21 – Museum of Contemporary Art, Vienna (2017); K21, Düsseldorf, Migros Museum, Zurich and Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai (2016); MIT List Visual Art's Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2015); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden, and Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2014); Wroclaw Museum of Contemporary Art, Wroclaw (2013). You have participated in international exhibitions, such as: 55th Venice Biennale and 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013); 18th Sydney Biennial (2012); 11th Lyon Biennial (2011). In 2018 she will also participate in the 47th International Film Festival Rotterdam.
