Night Shift:
Institutional Dreams
by Yasya Minenkova, Yanis Proshkinas
“In the depths of dreams I am born anew.”1
— Alain Bosquet
— Alain Bosquet
The body rests, but work continues. What happens when sleep itself becomes an artistic practice?
This question unfolds through a dialogical essay structured by the internal rhythms of sleep — from the threshold of falling asleep to awakening. In the exchange between curator and artist, dialogue weaves fragmented dream memories, associations, and cultural references, moving fluidly between lived experience, theory, and speculation.
Through this movement, the notion of oneiric curating takes shape as a provisional mode of curatorial thinking unfolding within sleep: a process in which accumulated, unprocessed experiences of art and institutional labour are reorganised beyond the demands of feasibility, visibility, and productivity. Rather than replacing curatorial practice, it reframes it, attending to how unrealised ideas persist before they enter form.
Sleep is understood here as a double process: the body’s withdrawal from activity, and the dreaming that unfolds within it. We approach it through three overlapping registers: as undercommons (a fugitive space of non-work and unmediated creativity), as work that does not sleep (invisible labour continuing within supposed rest), and as simulator (a space where institutional roles and environments become fluid and reconfigurable). Through this lens, oneiric curating emerges as a methodological reorientation of curatorial thinking that suspends institutional regimes of productivity and visibility, while reconfiguring artistic imagination and exhibition space as sites of pre-instrumental, non-optimisable thought.
This text is written from within practice. Yasya Minenkova works as an independent curator, focusing on how contemporary art engages with institutional regimes of visibility and forms of alienation. Yanis Proshkinas is an artist whose work engages organisational structures, labour, and the bodily effects of accelerated economies. Their shared attention to sleep emerged from necessity: institutional exhaustion and the difficulty of separating work work from rest — and more specifically, from sleep.
Dialogue serves as methodology, refusing monological authority. Between two voices emerges what neither could articulate alone: the recognition that sleep and dreaming — whilst radically private and seemingly utopian — are also institutional, political, and profoundly social.
[phase 0: falling asleep. from the outside to the inside]
Yasya: Fatigue is a mode of operation. Byung-Chul Han writes2 about the society of fatigue, in which the subject exploits itself while believing this to be freedom. In independent curatorial practice, this is particularly evident: exhibitions happen not because there is a budget or institutional support, but because the idea needs to be realised. Self-organisation demands full commitment with minimal resources.
Yanis, do you remember in May, we were working on a self-organised exhibition in Paris, in which you also participated. Two days of exhibition, then departure. I remained in a state of activation: the body exhausted, the mind still active, replaying how the dialogues between works might have been structured differently, which conceptual threads had not fully surfaced. Self-organisation is its own form of freedom: a seizure of space where institutional demands temporarily recede. But even here, not every configuration you conceive can be materialised. Some projects persist as potential: existing in what I think of as unrealised curating — curatorial thinking that accumulates in the spaces between realised projects, in conversations, in dreams, in the perpetual reworking of adjacencies that never entered form.
When I returned to Vilnius, my curatorial practice did not stop. It simply changed register: for an entire week, I dreamt of exhibitions.
> 4 June 2025, 04:42 — dream no. 1.
I dreamt that we installed a new artwork by Yanis at a new group exhibition. It was made of large sheets of very thin cardboard. The work appeared as a series of large diagrams or maps, something like a visual account of corporate labour, rendered on a weightless white surface. By association, it reminded me of Klee’s Angelus Novus — Benjamin’s “angel of history,”3 looking back at the past while being blown into the future. Only in Yanis’s case it was not an angel, but geometry, abstraction, continuing his path of research in a new visual form. The installation was approximately 5 × 2 metres in size. And I think that, by the end, part of it had torn.
The details kept slipping away, because I could not show the work and could not photograph it. In an era of the archival turn4 — a ubiquitous impulse towards fixation and reproduction — this radical non-documentability opens another temporality. What cannot be captured cannot be exchanged: it resists conversion into the kind of documented experience. Following Adorno5, what resists subsumption under categories of exchange retains something of its non-identity. The dream, in this sense, is a refusal of documentation: a rupture that compels new efforts of remembering and reconstruction, provoking active creative work rather than passive consumption of the archived image.
Curatorial work often involves translating the visual into language; but how does one describe something never seen, yet inhabited? In a dream, the image cannot be grasped, only remembered upon waking. From this gap emerge traces that unsettle conventional understandings of the image and its capture.
What interested me most, though, was the spatial dimension: sensing adjacency, scale, and orientation without a fixed viewpoint. In dreams, entire unimaginable architectures emerge: an exhibition in a cave where curatorial decisions felt both unexpected and precise, vast installations unfolding at an impossible scale. Dream-space operates according to a different structural logic: no stable frontal position, the viewer simultaneously inside and outside the scene, scale that does not obey bodily proportion. Space folds, expands, and contracts. For curatorial practice, this is not just an aesthetic curiosity: space can operate as a temporal device, slowing perception, redistributing attention, and suspending the demand for immediate legibility. The unexpected organisation of space in dreams suggests alternative modes of arranging artworks, unsettling frontal viewing and transforming adjacency into immersion.
Yanis: I would take a step back here and place your experience within a broader practice: that of dream sharing. It is a specific form of social interaction in which people tell one another their dreams, shaped by whom you share them with and which dreams you choose to tell. In the morning, my wife and I tell each other our dreams — often unpleasant ones, involving betrayal or death — so that the other person can help dispel their lingering effects, as if undoing a spell from another world.
I see your situation as a form of micro-subversion, unfolding as a parallel performative line between dreaming and exhibition-making. When you talk about dreaming about a work by a fellow artist, you are already producing a kind of performative act. Narrating a dream operates as a direct intervention. Once articulated, it enters a shared symbolic space and begins to act within it, shaping attention, association, and expectation.
When a dreamed work is told to an artist, the narration participates in their practice: it introduces images and directions that may later be taken up, transformed, or displaced. This, in itself, has value. I would call it oneiric subversion — a register in which ideas appear prior to stabilisation, suspended between emergence and realisation. Dreaming allows unrealised exhibitions, latent trajectories, and unfinished thoughts to re-enter experience as presences that continue to work without demanding resolution. Its subversive force lies precisely in this loosened relation to productivity: it introduces forms of action that resist being optimised, measured, or resolved.
Have you ever counted how many works by your fellow artists have appeared in your dreams since you first became aware of this pattern?
Yasya: I have, actually. I even started keeping a small diary of curatorial dreams. In a surprisingly short time, I dreamt of: (1) your new artwork; (2) a new project by Christoph Büchel; (3) a show by my friend and fellow curator Kate in a cave; (4) a porcelain tea set by some avant-garde artist from the 1960s, with lines of poetry written on each cup that together formed a single poem; (5) an outdoor public art exhibition in a courtyard, where a street artist presented a painted oval canvas and staged a performance with a rubbish bin (complete with proper exhibition design, walls and all, can you imagine?); (6) how another curator friend of mine did a retrospective of all her research topics in her life. I find this both absurd and genuinely exciting... I am writing them down! And also sketching them.