【OCAT上海馆 | 展览预告】策展人“说梦”

姜节泓

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多年前，在一个昏暗的房间里，一个十岁的女孩正向她时日不多的祖母讲述昨晚所做的梦：“我们都围在您的身边，您看起来很累。忽然飘来了一个大光，长了一双宽大的翅膀，耀眼极了，什么也看不清。它们从天上而来，而不是从窗外…… 您坐在翅膀中间的大光上，被托向上空——不再消瘦，也没有浮肿——完美的身体。忽然，这大光魔术般地腾空而起，好像儿童乐园里的那个玩意儿，然后降落在一朵云彩上。我们听见您从那里传来的笑声。”这是一个共享的梦：女孩作为做梦的人复述了这个真实的梦，同时这也是属于祖母的梦，她是梦境的主角，她对属世生命之后的去向深信不疑。在这个梦中，我们看见到了羽翼构成的那个看不得的大光以及那个重塑的身体，然而最终，云朵遮掩了一切，又或是因为渐行渐远，消失在了我们的视野中。唯有跳出我们的肉眼凡胎，才能听到祖母的欢笑——一种梦见的声音，并领受平安。我是屋子里的第三个人，聆听女孩——也就是我的女儿——重述着她的梦，同时又注视着我母亲平安的祷告——她已经太过虚弱，什么也听不见，我只好如此来捕捉种种细节，并所有盼望的依据。

与清醒时的思考相比，梦并没有更加粗枝大叶，理性欠奉，容易遗忘，不够完整；两者在本质上截然不同…… 梦绝不以任何方式思考，计算或判断；它自给自足，而焕然一新。

（弗洛伊德，《梦的解析》，1899）

在西方，再现梦境这一传统可以追溯至浪漫主义早期，甚至文艺复兴时期。然而弗洛伊德的这一著作已然影响了众多艺术家——例如我们即刻便能想到超现实主义。在东方，有庄子（约公元前369-286）梦蝶的经典寓言：“不知周之梦为胡蝶与，胡蝶之梦为周与？”由醒时与梦时的发问，挑战了我们对真实与幻觉的理解与定义，可以进一步涉及对生命和死亡分界的思考。

梦是非时间的。梦无法被预设，脱离我们的日常作息的成规；梦并非来自过去、现在或未来，也未必就有针对性的相应描绘；梦仅仅可以象征和指涉时间，而并不代表任何真实的时间跨度。梦是绝对私有的，只能被一个人接收，拥有并以某种形式阐释，没有任何合作的可能。

二十一世纪始于全新媒介与科技的诞生，然而人类的新老问题依然悬而未决。无论西方还是东方，我们仍然做着梦，一如既往，探索和再现着我们的问题，或是构建一个遥远的空间来反思现世的短暂。梦不仅穿梭于我们的潜意识，飘摇于我们在醒时的想像——白日梦，还安居在艺术作品的创作和感受过程中。

这五位来自挪威的当代艺术家创作涉猎广泛，在本展览中都采用基于声音与时间的媒介。好奇心使然，“我听见了你的梦”，展览中的作品探索、阐释并延续我们的想像与欲望，更为重要的是， 通过日常经验打造了视觉或听觉叙事，与此同时，又拉开这些叙事与我们之间的距离。在昼夜之间，在真理与谎言之间，在现实与想像之间，我们遇见了自己的梦。

英翻中：俞圣蓝，校对：姜节泓

姜节泓教授任英国伯明翰城市大学艺术学院研究总监，中国视觉艺术中心主任，英国学术刊物《中国当代艺术研究》（Intellect）主编。姜节泓一直专注于当代艺术和视觉文化的研究。近年主要策划的当代艺术展览包括第四届广州三年展主题展“见所未见”（2012），第三届曼彻斯特亚洲三年展主题展“天下无事”（2014），“真实的假像”（上海民生美术馆，2016），“遥不可知：英国当代艺术展”（上海OCAT，2016）以及首届泰国双年展“仙境的边缘”（甲米，2018-19）。他的书著包括《负担或遗赠》（2007）、《革命在继续：来自中国的新艺术》（2008）、《红》（2010），以及《没有记忆的时代：城市变迁中的中国当代摄影》（2015）。

Jiang Jiehong

Some years ago, in a dimly lit room, a 10-year-old girl started to describe her dream of the previous night to her grandmother who was in her last few days. ‘We were all around you. You looked tired. The light arrived, with a pair of huge wings, super bright, too bright to see. They did not come from outside the window, but from above… Sat between the wings, you were lifted – no longer skinny or swollen – with a perfect body. That light magically launched into the sky all of a sudden, like the thing in the middle of the theme park, and then landed on a beautiful cloud, from which we heard your laugh.’ It was a shared dream: a true dream retold by the girl the dreamer and, also, a dream of the grandmother, who was the protagonist and who believed in her destination after the secular life. In the dream, we see the invisible light configured by the wings and the restored body, and yet, at the end, they were all veiled by the cloud, or the distance, and became unseen again. We could only understand beyond our mortal eyes, and feel relieved to hear the happy voice of the grandmother, a dreamt sound. I was the third person in the room, listening to the retelling of the dream by the girl, my daughter, and watching my mother, who was too weak to hear but peacefully praying, in order to receive every detail of the happening, and assurance. 

The dream-work is not simply more careless, more irrational, more forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is completely different from it qualitatively… It does not think, calculate or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form. 

(Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899)

In the West, there is a tradition of dream representation that goes back to early romanticism and even to the Renaissance, but Freud’s book has influenced numerous artists – for example, one thinks straight away of the Surrealists. In the East, Zhuangzi’s (c. 369–286 bc) classic dream parable reads: ‘now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.’ By problematising the distinction between being awake and dreaming, the text challenges our understandings and definitions of reality and illusion, and can be extended to reflections on the separation between life and death.

Dreams are timeless. They cannot be prearranged or controlled in our daily schedules; they do not derive from, or necessarily portray, the past, the present or the future; and they are only symbolic or indicative, rather than representational of any real time span. Dream, strictly, is a private blessing. It can only be received, possessed and reinterpreted in whatever form by a singular authorship, with no possibility of collaboration.

The twenty-first century started with the advent of completely novel media and technologies; and yet, human problems remain, old or new. Between the West and the East, we dream, as usual, of exploring and representing our problems, or of constructing a distant space to reflect the temporality of this world. Dreams travel not only through our unconscious minds, but also through our imaginations, as invented dreams in our waking life, and through the processes of art production and perception.

These five leading artists from Norway work with a wide range of artistic practice, but one thing they have in common is that they all work with sound- and time-based media in this exhibition. Derived from curiosity, I Hear Your Dreams explores, interprets and extends our imaginations and desires, and, more significantly, the ways in which we make visual and/or audio narratives through our daily experience and, at the same time, to distance ourselves from it. Between day and night, between truth and lie, and between the real and the imagined, we meet our dreams.

Professor Jiang Jiehong is Head of Research at School of Art, Director of the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts, Birmingham City University, and he is also Principal Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Intellect). Jiang has extensive research and curatorial experience in contemporary art and visual culture. Jiang curated the Guangzhou Triennial: the Unseen (with Jonathan Watkins, 2012), the Asia Triennial Manchester: Harmonious Society (2014), the Shadow Never Lies (with Mark Nash, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, 2016), the Distant Unknown: Contemporary Art from Britain (OCAT Shanghai, 2016) and most recently, the First Thailand Biennale: Edge of the Wonderland (Krabi, 2018-19). Jiang’s book publications include Burden or Legacy: from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to Contemporary Art (Hong Kong University Press, 2007), the Revolution Continues: New Art from China (Jonathan Cape, 2008), Red: China’s Cultural Revolution (Jonathan Cape, 2010) and An Era without Memory: Chinese Contemporary Photography on Urban Transformation (Thames and Hudson, 2015). 

A K Dolven, to you 1994-2018, video still

Performer: Tale Dolven

Photo courtesy of the artist