“Everything in this whole world is an embedded series of dreams and novels, like boxes within boxes, one within another, and then in yet another, everything being a story of stories, like The Thousand and One Nights, unfolding false in the eternal night.” – Fernando Pessoa

 

Dream Marrow invites us to consider dreams and storytelling as collective endeavors with the power to connect, liberate and subvert. Hana Amani and Audie Murray posit dreaming, and other visionary acts, as holding the potential to connect us across generations and to remain sovereign in the face of oppression. The darkened chambers of dreamspace are occupied by collective voices and retellings. Dreaming becomes relational, and we become privy to lineages of thought that acknowledge the power of dreams and how they connect us to ancestors and others, future and past.
 

The Michif artist Audie Murray’s process-based practice centres on embodied experiences and asserts a presence of Métis cosmology. Her works included in Dream Marrow reflect on the capacity for dreams to connect individuals across generations, while speaking to, and enacting agency over, the portrayal of stories and imaginations with care and reciprocity. Murray’s work provides generative frameworks for how we might be in relation, despite the multiple crises we face.
 

The Sri Lankan–raised artist Hana Amani recasts mythical figures with complicated relationships to nighttime as powerful and visionary. She engages with women from Islamic mythology, recounting various aspects and highlighting the women’s desires, their curiosity and granting them a complexity that is often missing from popular accounts. Amani does so with an eye for the future, acknowledging that if their portrayal is symptomatic of patriarchal times, feminist retellings can provide an antidote.

Dream Marrow welcomes you to the twilight hours and the resistance that charts its path across the starry sky.

Curated by Emily Dundas Oke