Shows

No Tears for the Monsters of the Night. No Tears. is a group exhibition that brings together the voices of the four participating artists, János Brückner, Giulia Ottavia Frattini, Isabella Fürnkäs, and Tim Plamper with their diverse practices. The show is hosted by Kultur Kiosk in Stuttgart from 31 March to 30 April 2023 and is curated by Tim Plamper. The exhibition poses questions about the concepts of violation, trauma, and intrusion, but not through the lens of their literal meanings. Rather, it gravitates towards the chance of permeable liminalities and expansions of these events through re/dis-orientation, confrontation, access/exclusion and embodiment processes.

- Text by Tim Plamper

“All it would take to make a catalogue of monsters is to photograph in words the things the night brings to drowsy souls unable to sleep. These things have all the incoherence of dreams without the alibi of sleeping. They hover like bats over the soul’s passivity, or like vampires that suck the blood of submission.

They’re larvae from the debris on the hillside, shadows that fill the valley, remnants left by destiny. Sometimes they’re worms, loathsome to the very soul that cradles and breeds them; sometimes they’re ghosts that sinisterly skulk around nothing at all; sometimes they pop out as snakes from the absurd hollows of spent emotions.

Ballast of falseness, they’re useful for nothing but to render us useless. They are doubts from the abyss that drag their cold and slithery bodies across the soul. They hang on as smoke, they leave tracks, and they never amounted to more than the sterile substance of our awareness of them. One or another is like an inner firework, sparking between dreams, and the rest is what our unconscious consciousness saw of them.

A dangling, untied ribbon, the soul doesn’t exist in and of itself. The great landscapes belong to tomorrow, and we have already lived. The conversation was cut short and fizzled. Who would have thought life would turn out like this?

I’m lost if I find myself; I doubt what I discover; I don’t have what I’ve obtained. I sleep as if I were taking a walk, but I’m awake. I wake up as if I’d been sleeping, and I don’t belong to me. Life, in its essence, is one big insomnia, and all that we think or do occurs in a lucid stupor.

I’d be happy if I could sleep. This is what I think now, because I’m not sleeping. The night is an enormous weight beyond the silent blanket of dreams under which I smother myself. I have indigestion of the soul.

After this is over, morning will come as always, but it will be too late, as always. Everything sleeps and is happy except me. I rest a little, without even trying to sleep. And huge heads of non-existent monsters rise in confusion from the depths of who I am. They’re Oriental dragons from the abyss, with their red tongues hanging outside of logic and their eyes deadly staring at my lifeless life that doesn’t stare back.

The lid, for God’s sake, the lid! Close the lid on unconsciousness and life! Fortunately, through the open shutters of the cold window, a bleak thread of pale light begins to chase darkness from the horizon. Morning, fortunately, is what’s going to break. The disquiet that so wearies me has almost quieted down. A cock crows absurdly in the middle of the city. The wan day begins in my vague slumber. Eventually I’ll sleep. The noise of wheels tells me there’s a cart. My eyelids sleep, but not I. Everything, finally, is Destiny.”

- Text excerpt from The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa, 1931