Study for Social Dreaming, 2014–17

HD Video

For Study for Social Dreaming (2014–2017), Friedl arranged two public Social Dreaming sessions— loosely based on W.Gordon Lawrence’s method— in a small theatre in Rome as part of his workshop on Exercises in Imagination. Struck by Charlotte Beradt’s anthology The Third Reich of Dreams (a record, first published in 1966, of dreams dreamed between 1933 and 1939), which highlighted the social dimension of dreams and the role they can play as documents within political and historical anthropology, Lawrence started hosting weekly Social Dreaming Sessions together with a psychoanalyst in London in 1982. Following Friedl’s invitation, the participants were supervised and guided by two psychologists, sharing and telling each other their dreams without any prior instructions. Study for Social Dreaming uses the original footage filmed by several cameras during the two sessions. The fragmented montage blurs the actual chronology and creates a mockumentary of sorts.

HD video, color, sound
28:50 min., aspect ratio 16:9, loop
Edition of 4 + 2 AP

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Peter Friedl

**The Dramatist (Black Hamlet, Crazy Henry, Giulia, Toussaint), 2013**

Biography

Peter Friedl is a classic of contemporary art. The three-time documenta participant, born in 1960, can be considered a notorious participant in discourse - because his work has always understood how to address major themes in such a way that they found and find new forms away from the canon and mainstream. Forms that run counter to power and domination, subvert them, escape them.... and confront them in the process. Friedl takes away from history - for example colonialism or modernity, its paradigms and institutions - the power to define what is connected and how, and with an almost innocent-seeming aesthetic he tells a different story about humans and historical actions than we are used to and may find opportune. Peter Friedl provokes that which dominates us, including our own thinking. Throughout the years he his work has been displayed in meaningful solo exhibitions, most recently Teatro Popular (KOW Berlin, 2023), Report 1964-2022 (KW Berlin 2022) and No Prey, No Pay (Guido Costa Projects Turin, 2021) and major group exhibitions such as Life, Without Buildings, Gta exhibitions (ETH Zurich 2022), Das Auto rosi aber (KOW Berlin 2022) and Komunikazion - Inkomunikazio (Tabakalera, Centre for Contemporary Art, San Sebastian 2021).

Full Biography

Exhibitions at KOW