carlier | gebauer is pleased to announce Sleep Patterns and Musical Chairs, an immersive exhibition by Emily Wardill. This will be the first solo exhibition of the artist in Spain.

Emily Wardill’s works are best known for their sensual and psychologically charged refracted narratives. Wardill’s films, photographic works, drawings, and props investigate the complexities of communication and representation, the limitations and imprecision of language, and the point at which the immaterial adopts the material through insinuation. In the artist’s own words: 

“My work revolves around the imaginary image – images that we hold in our minds or collectively that order our understanding of the world.”

For the exhibition in Madrid, the artist will present a two-projection installation titled Sleep Patterns and Musical Chairs, that takes the imaginary of the nation state – projecting the patterns that car headlights make on our ceiling at night whilst musical hallucinations of national anthems bleed in through the space. The architecture becomes a part of the piece through these accidental moving highlights that make us think of not being able to sleep whilst pointing towards a fake origin –  the cars never existed and are represented through a remnant without an original. The soundtrack is composed from distorted national anthems that fight with each other, change keys and speeds to sound intoxicated, puzzle themselves into logics that wrap around into nothingness and descend into enthusiastic destruction (played on the piano by Daniel Bernardes).

Sleep Patterns and Musical Chairs was produced within the programme of ”La Caixa” Foundation, Support for Creation’22: Production and premiered earlier this year at Casa São Roque in Porto, Portugal, part of the artist’s solo exhibition Hourless and at large curated by Barbara Piwowarska.