In the exhibition you can see five of my grandmother's dream diaries but those
but those are only five from a total of about three hundred
that she dreamt later in her life
about her childhood home in Brno, in Czechoslovakia
and those three hundred are taken from a much larger group of about twenty thousand pages worth of dreams
that she recorded from about age 40 to the end of her life in her 80s
I thought of the video game at the beginning as being a kind of orientation device
in the video game, you navigate through the villa and find five diary pages
that correspond to the ones that are later enacted in the film
and alongside those pages,
an object will pop up
and this object is a little bit of a mascot of that dream
that also appears later in enacted version of the dreams
so these objects, which in the video game are
fully rendered, in detail and colour
in an otherwise grey boxed world
later pop up
in the film as grey objects in a full coluor world, and they act a little bit
like portals or wormholes between the two moving image pieces
The medium of film already sutures together different times and places it's
a kind of holding container that can receive different temporalities, that can
edit between one room and the next, between inside and outside etc, I think
it's one of the most apt media to translate dreams, which also jump from
place to place
film is a medium that captures
a space of reverie very well
but it also can ground that reverie in palpable, tangible, concrete details
I mean, it's literally a stream of light but it carries a lot of heft and weight
with it as well I think it's a whole world that's created
The selection of the five dreams focused on a kind of constructed narrative across the five
it replicates my grandmother's own experience having to flee Czechoslovakia
as a young Jewish girl with her industrialist parents just prior to the Nazi invasion
The whole exhibition plays with this question of access and denial of access throughout
so you can see the archive of three hundred pages but you're not
quite close enough to be able to read it
At the very end of the show one can read
the five dreams from which the film is constructed so you do have some contact
but mostly you're denied that contact
this is to hint at the paradox of making something public out of
a body of material that is by nature so private
and perhaps the fact that the pages are not always accessible also hints at the
fact that I don't always have full access to the true meaning of the dreams
what I offer is just an interpretation of them
through reconstructing the five dreams and reinserting them into her childhood home
I've reinvested the dreams with body and
life and emotion, in an attempt to restore to the house
her history and her emotional experience
so although my grandmother is one protagonist of the exhibition
her house is the other