No Awakening

’’The foundation for Kata Mijatović’s exhibition No Awekening lies in the many years the author has been exploring the phenomena of dreams and dreaming – more precisely, thematizing and researching the relationship between our rational self, which shapes all spheres of human action and life and, on the other hand, the large and unexplored area of the unconscious that redefines the constructed images of our reality.

One of the main works of the artist’s researchis the Dream Archive /www.arhivsnova.hr/ founded in 2013 as an interactive online platform onto which over two thousand textual records of dreams from all over the world and in different languages have been entered to this date. Symbolically stored in the domain of immaterial virtual reality, this particular base for the accumulation and release of the unconscious, manifested through sleep, does not only bring individually told and transmitted introspective contents but above all functions as a space of universal narrative and collective experience regarding the existence of internal creative mental forces that are beyond the control of the conscious. In keeping with her interest in the phenomenon of the unconscious in respect to its potentials to sharpen the perception of reality itself, or the ability to open the field of subtle subversions and, as she states, resistance to the negotiated image of the world, Mijatović introduces the poetics of dreams as a conceptual expression in the reflections on the dominant “oversized rational constructions we live daily” but also the paradox of today’s time, often on the verge of hypnagogic states and the astonishing.

The author uses her own dreams, those collected through archives, or in other ways, as a pretext and constructive material for a number of works she performs in mixed media, ranging from interactive and site-specific installations, performances and videos to objects and audio forms. In a wide range of inscriptions of personal, intimate, enigmatic, traumatic, socially connoting, selected dream contents in the artist’s works function as a specific type of problem articulation of processes, mechanisms, norms, laws, contexts in which our human and social existences take place.’’

/curator: Miroslav Karić, Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade/