Dream Pools & Collecting Holes

The Quay Brothers have been working on their third feature film for several years, taking their cue from Bruno Schulz’s novel Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937). In this installation they lift a tip of the veil and introduce a number of motifs, images and objects. A man travels to visit his father at a sanatorium – a floating world halfway between sleep and wakefulness, a morbid ambiguity of time that cannot be measured by clocks. Schulz: “Your Father’s passing, the death that overcame him in your country, has not yet occurred here.” Within the sanatorium’s labyrinthine limbo of uncertainty, objects and events roam with a force all their own.

The installation invites us to explore the mythopoetic world of Bruno Schulz, using his literary and graphic works as the foundation to construct an autonomous filmic world. Dream Pools & Collecting Holes represents the Schulzian notion of the thirteenth ‘freak’ month – the apocrypha slipped secretly between the pages and chapters of the great book constituting Schulz’s mythological ‘appendix’. In a first section, ‘Apparitions on Glass’, an array of binoculars and objects in vitrines prepare the traveler for the second section, where a miniature sanatorium emerges from a pool, as from the underworld.

With the support of Koninck Studios and Tommy Simoens Art Gallery. Also see Talk: Frameworks – Quay Brothers.

Thu 23 Jan to Sat 1 Feb, 11:00-17:00 (Fridays, 11:00-21:00), TENT, €5, various discounts