Beauty Sleep Russia: Act 3

In a dream, there is no personal responsibility for what happens. Beauty Sleep Russia delves into how political will and responsibility are often replaced by illusory notions of goodness and justice, centralized in figures of unchallengeable power. This phenomenon, mirrored in the Soviet era's suppression of individual and historical experiences, continues today, manifesting in a reluctance to confront issues like the war in Ukraine, managing to avoid thinking about the war, or looking for excuses for it. The term ‘Dream’ is used here as a metaphor for the absence of conscious will and the flow of hallucination in a totalitarian society. The buzzing stream of disinformation machinery, connecting propaganda, fakes, digital and real violence and cruelty, and the lack of empathy, constitutes what I call a space of uncontrollable hallucination or sleep. Sleep generators—power and its institutions, including the arts, as well as various machines of punishment, intimidation, and persuasion—program and reprogram consciousness, sending it into a mode of apathetic helplessness and confidence in the only correct view of events.