CAN'T YOU SLEEP? — alisaomelianceva

Can’t you sleep?

Gallery Statement at Vienna Parallel 2025
in collaboration with Base AT4 gallery

Otto Wagner Areal, Vienna
September 2025

A patient’s room needs bedding. Blood, night sweat, and fragments of dreams become caught in the sheets. What existed before the sanatorium and what comes after illness intermingle in a diffuse present. The hospital is a transit zone – at least that is what we wish for it to be. Much as we expect our dreams to leave us again in the clear light of morning.

“I always had access to other worlds. We all do. Because we dream,” is how the Surrealist Leonora Carrington described the power of the night. Yet the dream does not only bring us into paradise. Often it causes unrest in the supposed rest of the night. According to Aristotle, dreams are “the images, or residuary movements, which are based upon the sensory impressions”. They turn our bed into an open field in which inner and outer realities encounter one another.

Upon waking Alisa Omelianceva (*1997, Russia) speaks her dream narratives into a recording device. Later, these soundscapes become the site of her artistic practice. She wraps her body in road-marking material, places the space into the soundtrack of dreams, and moves in relation to the bedsheet. In the end, this textile, painted with the body, becomes a fragment of a deeply personal narrative: when light strikes the fabrics, they reflect back. And perhaps reveal – as on asphalt – the predetermined boundary between marked terrain and wilderness?

The bed, as art-historically charged as it is biographically, is here not only a site. It is pictorial body, tool, piece of evidence, and metaphor at once – estranged and yet distinct. Omelianceva does not play games. She is direct, but makes use of poetry – and also of natural science. The injured body and the means of medicine repeatedly stand within the field of interest of the graduate of the University of Applied Arts. Whether abstracted medical instruments, which she reinterprets sculpturally, or analog photography, painting, drawing, or installation – Omelianceva thinks in narratives.

Historically, four patient beds once stood here in Room 216. Patient rooms are not operating theatres, but halls for human beings. The “humanization” of architecture, especially in the sanatorium context, was a concern of the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898–1976). He emphasized: “The ordinary room is made for a standing person. A sickroom, however, must be made for a person lying down. Colours, lighting, heating and so on must be designed with this in mind.” The artist likewise applies the measure of the reclining body. She also follows Aalto’s idea of adjusting the lighting. She covers the window with insulating foil, so that the reflections of the room intensify, shifting back and forth between viewers and works. “Lovingly you unarm the beautiful body that unarms you” is what the artist calls her works on bedsheets. The project title of the series – with which she received the Ö1 Talents Grant in 2023 – goes back to a confusion of the German “umarmen” (to embrace) with the English “unarm”(to disarm) in Orhan Pamuk’s story Can’t You Sleep?

For PARALLEL VIENNA 2025 she expands this concept in the historically charged location of Baumgartner Höhe. The Otto Wagner Hospital, built in 1907 as a psychiatric sanatorium, has always stood in the field of tension between care and control, healing and exclusion. Entangled in the euthanasia programs during National Socialism, the complex is also a poignant architectural testimony to how strict order was placed above the supposedly irrational nature of illness.

Omelianceva repeatedly recognizes parallels between medicine and art. For medicine as for sculpture, the body is the tool. A reference to Alisa Omelianceva’s sculptural abilities is discreetly hidden in the room: a dysfunctional key suggests that one can hardly escape one’s dreams.

Paula Watzl, September 2025