Can’t you sleep?
Alisa Omelienceva / Gallery Statement

A patient room needs bed linen. Blood, night sweat and fragments of dreams become entangled in the sheets. What came before the sanatorium and what follows illness merge into a diffuse present. The hospital is a transit zone – or at least that is how we would like to think of it. Much like we expect our dreams to leave us again in the bright light of morning.

“I always had access to other worlds. We all do. Because we dream,” described Surrealist Leonora Carrington the power of the night. Yet dreams do not only transport us to paradise. Often, they disturb the supposed tranquillity of sleep. According to Aristotle, dreams are “remnants of sensory perceptions” from our waking state. They turn our beds into open fields where inner and outer realities encounter one another.

In the morning, Alisa Omelianceva (*1997, Russia) speaks her dream narratives into a recording device. Later, these soundscapes become the setting for her artistic practice. She wraps her body in road-marking material, layers the space with the soundtrack of her dreams, and moves across the bed linen. Eventually, this textile, painted with her body, becomes a fragment of a deeply personal narrative: when light falls onto the fabrics, they reflect it back. And perhaps, as on asphalt, reveal the prescribed boundary between marked territory and wilderness?

The bed, charged with both art-historical and biographical meaning, is not merely the site of action here. It is simultaneously image, body, tool, piece of evidence and metaphor – estranged, yet unmistakable.

Omelianceva does not play games. She is direct, but draws on poetry – and on the natural sciences. The wounded body and the instruments of medicine repeatedly occupy the field of interest of the graduate of the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Whether abstracted medical instruments that she reinterprets sculpturally, analogue photography, painting, drawing or expansive installations – Omelianceva thinks in narratives.

Historically, Room 216 contained four patient beds. Patient rooms are not operating theatres, but spaces for human beings. The “humanisation” of architecture, particularly in the context of sanatoriums, was explored by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto (1898–1976), among others. He emphasised: “The ordinary room is for a person standing upright; a patient room, however, is for a person lying down. Colours, lighting, heating and other things must be designed accordingly.”

The artist, too, takes the lying body as her measure. She likewise follows Aalto’s idea of adapting the lighting to the space. She covers the window with insulating foil, intensifying the reflections within the room so that they move back and forth between the viewers and the works.

“Lovingly embrace the beautiful body that embraces you,” the artist calls her works on bed linen. The title of the series – for which she received the Ö1 Talente Scholarship in 2023 – originates from a confusion between the German word “umarmen” (to embrace) and the English “unarm” in Orhan Pamuk’s story Can’t Sleep?

For PARALLEL VIENNA 2025, she expands this concept within the historically charged setting of the Baumgartner Höhe. The Otto Wagner Hospital, built in 1907 as a psychiatric sanatorium, has always existed within the tension between care and control, healing and exclusion. During the Nazi era, the institution became entangled in the euthanasia programmes. Today, the complex remains a powerful architectural testimony to the way rigid order was imposed upon the supposedly irrational nature of illness.

Omelianceva repeatedly recognises parallels between medicine and art. In both medicine and sculpture, for instance, the body is the instrument.

A quiet reference to Alisa Omelianceva’s sculptural abilities is concealed within the room: a dysfunctional key suggests that escaping from our dreams may be nearly impossible.

Text: Paula Watzl, September 2025

10th –14th September 2025
Pavillon 07, Room 216
Otto-Wagner-Areal
Baumgartner Höhe 1
1140 Vienna