ON SLEEP
Immersive & Participatory Performance (2013-14) “Grover’s latest work explores the contours of sleep as Art” - The Indian Express
“A phenomenal series that disrupts our post-industrial experience of sleep” - Reuters
“Schlafen ist als Grundbedürfnis des Menschen gesellschaftliche nicht mehr anerkannt” - Neukollner Net
Audience registers for an overnight sleep event — a concert, a walk, a lab — and in this one week long sleep experience, Grover transforms the city and the studio into a gentle space cradling our collective sleeping energies, listenings, dreamings, and image-making, lulling everyone into sleep with a set of carefully curated performances, participatory acts, and live-improvisations. In the mornings, the audiences and artists gather and collectively discuss their visions and dreams, patterns and resonances that emerge from their immersion into the Sleep Festival.
ON SLEEP explores the performative in sleep - interactions between the architecture for sleep, sleep rituals, sleepers’ communities, economies centered around sleep, and the transformative capacity of sleep itself. ON SLEEP is conceived as a dual city project, held simultaneously in Delhi and Berlin. It aims at creating a phenomenological archive of different sleep experiences speci:ic to the two cities. Conceptualised as a multi-tier cross disciplinary project, including performance, installations, site visits, walks, discussions, digital connections, and solitary reflections, this project investigates particular sleeping practices in three kind of human experiences: sleep in public territories, sleep in private spaces, and sleep in digitally networked environments. Each event encouraged the participants to immerse themselves in a variety of sleep environments, often with specific tasks/roles aimed both at investigating quotidian sleep practices and re-orienting our understanding/experiencing of the phenomenon of sleep at large.
PART I | Duration: All night
Would you like to sleep like someone else? Would you like to author someone else’s sleep? Do you imagine sleeping to be a performance? Be a part of a special gathering of Sleep Surfers. Sleeping like someone else is essentially living like them. This event is structured as a night long experience, in which you visit a stranger’s sleeping place. You follow instructions on how they sleep, spend time in their sleeping environment, and be guided by questions and provocations on contemporary sleep. Is sleeping the way we do today ‘natural’? Did we always sleep in private rooms? How is our sleep shaped by where we sleep, how we sleep, when we sleep? You play the role of a visitor, visiting a temporary museum of sleep. You observe, you record, you live it for one night. The event ends next morning with a complimentary breakfast, where all visitors and their hosts share and archive their discoveries. This is a place-specific event examining the relationship between sleep and private property.
PART II | Duration: 2hrs on site
All cities have troubled sleep. Delhi tosses and turns between the sleep mafia of Old Delhi, improvised sleep bunkers near Seelampur, the car-sleepers in the Urdu Bazaar parking lots and the innumerable innovated, informal practices that the homeless put together to find comfortable sleeping spots. Is there a survivor’s manual to sleeping in Delhi without money or shelter? Ranjit, a local sleep entrepreneur walks us through one of the many concealed, improvised sleeping places - performing a survivor's manual for finding a safe sleeping spot in Delhi. He shares his own experience of sleeping for years in improvised spaces, and reveals the operation of a local sleep mafia and the informal sleep industry in Delhi. In the same evening, audiences visit the retail store of the most expensive mattress makers in the world - Savoir Beds. The franchise owners give audiences a tour of how the mattresses are hand-crafted, and introduce them to the manufacturing process, where their labour comprises overwhelming of economic migrants from Bangladesh and India. This is a site-specific event examining the contemporary transaction between sleep, economy, and public property.
PART III | Duration 12hrs (night long event)
SLEEP III is conceived as an endurance event, configured to test the relationship with sleep in the age of global capital, the armature of pharmaceutical wakefulness, and a 24/7 networked world. Participants are invited to perform sleep over the internet. A complex structure called the Sleep Hotel is built – a façade made of twelve different ‘beds’, with walls made of thickly clustered sound insulating mattresses.
Each ‘bed’ is connected to a counterpart in the other city (Delhi & Berlin in this instance). Each bed requires the two partners, located halfway across the world, to perform a task that focused on one aspect of contemporary sleep today. Participants immerse themselves in different sleep practices, and tasks around sleeping and sleeplessness, as they hop from one enclosure to another through the night. Sleep Hotel is a night-long event, connecting participants in two different cities for over 8 hours continuously.
The audience is requested to bring their favourite pillow, blanket, bedsheet, toiletries and any other accompaniments that are part of their sleep rituals.
Conceptualised and Curated by Amitesh Grover (with Frank Oberhausser & Shaunak Sen)
SLEEP II Performed by Ranjit Kumar & Mrs. Oyly Carte
Technology Design by Georg Werner & Akshay Srivastava
Show Manager Lily Teksang | Film by Shaunak Sen and Aman Mann | Produced by Heimathafen Berlin & Goethe Institut India. 2014
Nominated by Irini Papadimitriou, for Prix Ars Electronica 2016 in the Interactive Art + Category
