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 can bereplaced 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 consciouswill 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 variousmachines of punishment, intimidation, and persuasion—program andreprogram consciousness, sending it into a mode of apathetic helplessnessand confidence in the only correct view of events.

Project intertwines the historical with the digital, examining the digitalaspects of Russian imperialism and colonial wars through cyber lenses. Itincorporates ceramic devices symbolizing sleep-portals and prostheses,
representing the paralysis of action and absence of strength. These arecoupled with a play’s digital battlefield interface modeled on the Russiansocial network 'VKontakte,' highlighting surreal dialogues and propagandanarratives.

Prosthetic devices, whatever they may be, are like the poisoned spindle thatplunges the Sleeping Beauty deeper into an eternal sleep, preserving her insubjugation to power.