This programme introduces journeys into dreamscapes in which artists blur the boundaries between reality and fiction to evoke and explore subconscious realms. In these moving image works, dreams serve as subjects of inspection, deep personal yearning, and political strategies as well as metaphors for unspoken desires, hope, and our experience of diverse worlds.

Raymond Red’s The Yawn (1984) delves into the interiorities of two men on a double bunk bed—one an insomniac, the other in deep sleep—through a monologue and snippets of postcolonial criticism from a rattling radio, intersected by images of the outside world. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Emerald (2007) conjures the haunting history of the Morakot Hotel, abandoned after the 1997 financial crisis, through hypnotic visuals of an empty room overlaid with a non-diegetic conversation on dreams and memory. Generated through self-hypnosis, Basma al-Sharif’s Deep Sleep (2014) moves through vivid colour fields and abandoned ruins in Malta, Athens, and Gaza, inviting us to transcend borders and envision a different future for the Gaza region.

Liu Guangli’s Can GPT Dream of a Pink Elephant? (2025) examines aphantasia—the inability to visualise mental images—through a diagnostic dialogue between an aphantasic person and AI. Using the metaphor of a pink elephant, the work considers how the absence of inner imagery resists today’s image-saturated culture. Finally, Gao Yuan leads viewers into a surreal dreamscape in Lunar Dial (2016). An animation of 400 acrylic paintings, the work illustrates the cyclical nature of time through vignette representations of light, water, and human knowledge where reality and imagination intertwine.