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Artist at Work – Again, 2011

Figures of Sleep, a major international exhibition, considers the cultural anxieties manifest in the popular and critical imagination around the collapsing biological function of sleep under economic, social and technological transformation. If the night was the space of mystic quandary, and a creative catalyst and spiritual and cultural resource, today’s globalized capitalism and market and military demands for 24/7 service hours are stretching human body and mind in unprecedented ways. Is sleep in crisis? Exceedingly, artists have adopted the motif of sleep as a cipher for material, aesthetic, existential and political considerations of these urgent cultural concerns.