All you who sleep tonight (2023)
Moving image work, performed and recorded on Gadigal Land. Duration- 5 mins.
All you who sleep tonight
Far from the ones you love,
No hand to left or right
And emptiness above—
Know that you aren't alone.
The whole world shares your tears,
Some for two nights or one,
And some for all their years.
By Vikram Seth
This work attempts to reimagine our connection to land. It seeks to explore how an artist’s body re-imagines homelands and their physical and emotional imprints. Here the artist travels temporally and spatially across the fuzzy borders of the subconscious through the playground of dreams to arrive at a communal home-landing.
The soundscape is made up of excerpts of audio dream recordings the artist began documenting ever since she began her art journey on Gadigal Land, in Sydney, circa 2022.
The viewer is invited into a world of buried stories, quiet yearnings, and longings for what is left behind with the reality of an identity formed at junctions of crossed borders. In the state of being half asleep, language bleeds into sounds of incoherent spaces.
Indian author and poet Vikram Seth’s Poem-
‘All You Who Sleep Tonight’ becomes the title of the work alluding to the loneliness and emptiness one encounters when falling asleep far from the people and places they may call home.
That ache is woven into the isolated movements that form a tapestry mimicking a lull of the subconscious body. The artist treads this new landscape as a stranger, a guest, a lone ranger- falling in and out of a state of make-believe.
