Bedtime Chronicles

Right now, in this part of the world, that is — Berlin, Germany, Summer 2024 (the here and now) — a group of artists (we, a temporary unit) have put together an exhibition (another temporary unit), marking the beginning of a collaboration between strangers from different places, with future here-and-nows, and an evolving configuration of we. This is also an invitation to share an experience that attempts to re-contour collective feelings about time, so that the temporary we also includes you, and together we go on a dream-like drift that is at times whimsical and provocative, at times resembling a nightmare.

Bedtime Chronicles, a group exhibition at SAP Space, presents works by Diane Lavoie, Andrew J Burford, Mike Chattem, Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson, Matthew Kelly Debbaudt, Keenan Derby, Lesya Godfrey, Easton Miller, Ilyn Wong, and Anna Zakelj. It is part of the B-LA-M festival, a three-year art exchange between the independent art scenes in Berlin, Los Angeles & Mexico City. In its first iteration, SAP Space is collaborating with Gallery ALSO in Los Angeles, and the exhibition is a joint production by artists from both cities.

It so happens that right now in this part of the world, summer is in full swing, which means that the days are long, and everything is alive and buzzing. The long hours of midsummer daylight impart a dreaminess that can be disorienting, so that the here and now can somehow feel like a memory. Midsummer is, in a way, a collision. The body-memory of all previous long summer nights and midsummer dreams.

With this dreaminess at its core, Bedtime Chronicles meanders in and out of focus, and narrates a woven tale dictated by dream logic. It supposes that if everything is dreamy, then every moment must be dominated by the blurriness of bedtime. Bedtime, like midsummer, is also a collision — an undefined period of time that can, under different circumstances, feel like eons or a split second. Whether alone or shared, bedtime can promise intimacy, illuminate loneliness, or be utterly mundane. Bedtime is always a slippage into the unknown.

Matthew Kelly Debbaudt, one of the organizers of the show, installed a version of Bedtime Chronicles at Gallery ALSO in February, for which he invited nine LA-based artists to contribute artworks. For the exhibition in LA, Matthew made a site-specific wall-drawing, providing a kooky and humorous allegorical ground on which the other artworks sat. For this iteration of Bedtime Chronicles in Berlin, Matthew will make another site-specific wall drawing on the interior walls of SAP Space, acting as the narrative thread through a disorienting dream.

The scarcity of warm summer months here in Berlin lends the acuity of the dreaminess of this particular here-and-now, and artworks conceived and made in a far-away city in which warm days are plentiful take on different meanings here. Much like how dreams emerge as mysterious patchworks of waking life, this dream sequence is a manifestation of seemingly disparate artistic voices converging on one place, coherent through the universality of two facts of life: that dreams are never reliable, and bedtime always comes around.

— Text by Ilyn Wong