The exhibition at Freelands Foundation, There, where we promenade brought together work by four female artists – Etel Adnan, Susan Aldworth, Rachel Kneebone and Leonor Serrano Rivas.

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There, where we promenade presented a body of work designed to explore the pedagogy of sleep as an active site for cataloguing memory. Drawing on poetic, psychological and physical investigations, the exhibition looked at unconscious dream states and modes of knowledge negotiated through art, science and the imagination. Taken from artist, philosopher and poet Etel Adnan’s book Night, the exhibition title and concept places sleep at its centre as a way to unearth memories that are held in the body.

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The collection of works brought together for this exhibition explored how the inhabited body (singular and collective) operated within the boundaries between conscious and subconscious states. Foregrounded within the psychoanalytic theorem that every dream happens in accordance with its interpretation, the collection of works question the porous interplay between sleeping and dreaming as chambers or channels that open into one another.

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As psychologist Carl Jung stated, ‘In each person’s past there are elements of different value which determine the psychic constellation’; crossing the threshold of the gallery audiences were met with a group of works that slowly revealed themselves, slipping between both exterior and interior spheres. Each work reveals more than the material within which it inhabits, providing subtle emotional and spatial energies that vibrate throughout the whole collection of works, like an undercurrent of slow oscillations and an excavation of what it means to be.