Prophetic Dreams

Kutlesa is delighted to announce Prophetic Dreams, a group exhibition featuring works by Barry X Ball, Ginny Casey, Emily Furr, Tommy Harrison, Noorain Inam, Soojin Kang, Hélio Luís, Aramis Navarro, Jacopo Pagin, Lydia Pettit, Gonçalo Preto, Noah Schneiderman, Danilo Stojanović, Alexandre Wagner, Pei Wang, and Hualin Zhang.

I am an urge, an idea, a portent of impossible dreams.

–The Egyptian Book of the Dead

The ubiquity of dreams bridges human experience across time and place, forging a common desire for understanding. In ancient civilizations, oneiromancy, or the interpretation of dreams to foretell the future, featured prominently across regions and cultures. Numerous peoples practiced the widely-held belief that dreams were messages from gods or the dead, often arriving as ominous warnings.

Somniale Danielis, a 5th century manual written in Latin, was a guide to decoding dreams that gained popularity in the Middle Ages, despite the Church’s stringent attempts to suppress it. Structured like a glossary, the key dream themes were alphabetically arranged, followed by a concise interpretation. The dream manual was a genre of literature that existed across all social strata in this time period, possessing a level of cultural interest and importance that transcended societal divisions.

In the 20th century, Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed his dream theory, arguing that dreams reveal more than they conceal. For Jung, dreams reflected the imagination, expressed through the most readily available language of the collective unconscious: mythic narratives. In 1913, Jung experienced a series of dreams alluding to a darkening atmosphere in Europe, an overpowering vision of the devastation to come. Yet not all prophetic dreams are foreboding: others can provide guidance, wisdom, and healing.

This group exhibition offers no manual or demystification. Instead, it urges viewers to explore the depths of their own subconscious to question the boundaries of our earthly realm and beyond, considering the nature of premonition and the interconnectedness of dreams and waking lives. The need for prophecy grows in times of great uncertainty; and in this age of scientific breakthrough and technological dominance, many mysteries nonetheless remain. It is this unknown that holds poetic, transformative potential: dreams are a phenomenon or plane with which all of us at one point or another engage—deeply personal, yet profoundly interconnected.

Text by Sabrina Tamar