Curator’s words | Dr Işıl Ezgi Çelik

Dreams don’t exist. Still, it’s all a dream. We are all sleepless, ever-aware and dreaming. When does a dream start, and where does it end? Aren’t dreams real, or is waking life made of dreams? Am I awake? Am I dreaming? Whose dream am I in? You know, we could have closed the door and slept like the others, despite the cities engulfed by the fires. At dawn, we could have watched the dream drape the mind like a fog, descending on mad-figures frozen by the smoke. In the end, aren’t dreams to forget what we can’t remember and to remember what we can’t forget? This is the Möbius loop, the unfathomable sleep closing in on waking life. I am asleep, awake; I am in a dream. The vision of a new world, ruled by technocrats, crippled the consciousness of the old one through two devastating wars. Surrealists retreated into dreams, gazing at and praising them for the hidden knowledge within their mazes. Dreams are deceptive and illusory. Every vision is a delusion—when dreamers, deemed mad, are wrapped in visions that are not their own. They are the sleeping vision and soliloquies of the mind. Dreams are desires, they are to be desired by all. Dreams are deceptions that come true. The poet had warned: ‘Life is not a dream. Beware! Beware! Beware!’ Nobody is asleep; yet one and all are captured by a dream. The philosopher had warned: ‘Beware of the dreams of others, for if you are caught in their dreams, you are doomed.’ The sleepless cyberspace is oneiric; the dream of technocrats unfolds swiftly. An ancient dream materialises, heralding the end of a world once again. The collision of technology with life renders the once deceptive dream more real than the real. We are all haunted by a dream and are all in it. But, what do we dream of herein? The Dream exhibition brings together twelve global non-binary and women artists to share their versions of dreams and dreaming within dreamy cyberspace.