Many of us will identify with feeling shattered by the world we live in. While we’re becoming more familiar with mindfulness and the need to switch off, many of us struggle to do so. It’s exactly this pressure to constantly consume and produce that is the focus of Somerset House’s forthcoming exhibition, 24/7: A Wake-Up Call for Our Non-Stop World.
Its curator, Sarah Cook, wants visitors to explore their relationship with sleep and how little we have become accustomed to having, often delaying going to bed to mindlessly look at our social media feeds. Even daydreaming has taken a backseat as the pull of the screen lures us in.
“Poor sleep is regarded as a public health epidemic and it is something most of us can relate to,” Cook says. “We are losing the distinction between being ‘on’ (at work or in social situations) and being ‘off’ (asleep, or even daydreaming). We scroll, scroll, scroll on our devices when we should be asleep. Even your time spent on social media, which you’d think is your leisure-time, has become work-time, mostly for the big tech companies running those platforms.”
The exhibition was inspired by art historian Jonathan Crary and his book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, which looks at how consumers are pushed into constant activity through all-hours consumption, and the ramifications this has on our sleep patterns. Somerset House’s showcase has enlisted varying artists from different mediums “to help us to see the changes in how we spend our time and to understand the effects of more recent technologies”, be it an iPhone or FitBit.
Thought-provoking works include Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s bedtime story of a businessman who outsources his sleep and Tatsuo Miyajima’s meditative isolation chamber Life Palace (tea room), which visitors can climb inside, then shut the door and bathe in the blue glow of LED countdowns. The exhibition concludes with Daily tous les jours’ ‘I heard there was a secret chord’, where visitors join listeners all around the world and hum Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.
Ultimately, Cook hopes 24/7 will help us to reset the damaging cycle we have become a part of, although not through current solutions which involve more work and do little to solve the problem.
“We appreciate there is no easy fix to our 24/7 lives and sleeplessness,” she says. “A lot of existing remedies involve us buying more stuff, or endlessly tracking our biological patterns, or optimising to work more efficiently, all of which is the problem with our non-stop world in the first place.
“Instead, the exhibition focuses on the social side: sleep is something we all have to do and we have to rely on each other to create conditions where getting rest is possible,” she concludes. “If you leave the exhibition with a renewed sense of yourself as part of a collective, where you share space and time with one another, then it will have been worthwhile.”
24/7 is at Somerset House, London, from 31 October until 23 February 2020.
