Dämmerschlaf. Nick Dorey, Mikala Dwyer, Clare Milledge

2016 will open with Dämmerschlaf, a group exhibition featuring new, site-specific work commissioned from three of the inaugural Artspace One Year Studios Artists. Translated into English as ‘twilight sleep’, the term describes the state induced by a combination of analgesia (pain relief) and amnesia developed in Germany in the early twentieth century to combat pain — or the memory of pain.

Dämmerschlaf looks to the invisible forces that motivate, guide, connect and entangle us with one another, engaging ideas around the supernatural, the occult, alternate spiritualities and different ways of perceiving reality. Collaboratively weaving together an immersive and embodied realm, the artists will also install and alternately inhabit a mis en scène of studio refuse and detritus, transforming the exhibition space into a live site for composting ideas, transforming matter and unearthing imaginative forms from the subterranean foundations of The Gunnery.

Artspace will host a number of public programs during the course of this exhibition, including artist talks with local sustainability collective GreenUps, as well as a screening of the film Containment — part-graphic novel, part speculative documentary and part art observational essay filmed in weapons plants, Fukushima and deep underground that seeks out a universal language of warning systems in a future nuclear half-life.