HOW518活动招募｜《仿佛我们游走在梦醒之间》 集体诗歌活动

In 2018, the artist lived with a community of dislocated women in Bogor, an outskirt of Jakarta, Indonesia during the months of Ramadan. Xu witnessed the women sleeping all day to escape their realities, because wakefulness was often more horrifying than their dreams.

In the site-specific installation, "As If We Are In Between Sleeping and Waking", the fabrics collected from homes of dislocated women around the world are frozen in time, suspended in states of intimacy, loss, temporality, exile, listlessness—living in between uncertainty and fear, the women collectively chose to escape into liminal states of sleep.

Yet, no matter the women's situation, the walls of their temporary shelters are always decorated with care—the site-specific video installation attempts to "re-remember" intimate fragments and memories filmed inside their bedrooms, inviting the viewer to "listen" and "be with" through care, intimacy, and touch.

Here, at the HOW Art Museum, this site-specific installation attempts to create a space of tenderness for holding, where women can find refuge and shelter to dream safely, to collectively be together.

On Saturday night, the artist and co-readers are initiating an open call for all those who identify as women* to come together in an act of collective poetry— all are invited to read aloud from the poetry and testimonies of forty-six women* collected in the archives of the exhibit, weaving together a collective poetic soundscape on-site.

We invite you to bring a pillow from your home to create a collective on-site shelter.

*While this event specifically invites those who identify as women or trans* to read aloud, those who identify as men are welcome to join and listen.

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