Online Exhibition

Reimagining Sleep Online Exhibition

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    Reimagining Sleep is an online exhibition and co-production project that investigates how creativity can support and develop sleep-based academic research. The exhibition highlights the many ways in which creativity communicates, entertains, and reveals under-explored paths for those interested in sleep, and especially for those living with sleep difficulties.

    The exhibition gathers an extensive collection of objects, artefacts, samples, writings, and soundscapes made by, with, and for people affected by sleep’s relationship to three themes:

    Reimagining Sleep is a project which places co-production at its core. The exhibition continues this by encouraging all those who engage with it to themselves become co-producers. Our goal is to connect and involve multiple voices in order to foster openness, transparency, accessibility, and experimentation in sleep research. You are invited to collaborate with us in this ongoing process of participatory conversation, knowledge-sharing, and content development.

    This is Reimagining Sleep’s unfolding, “organic”, and open-source ethos. On this website, you can access free toolkits and contribute to the exhibition by submitting your responses to the toolkits’ instructions. Everyone becomes an active agent in this project of sleep.

    All the artworks populating Reimagining Sleep pose questions about sleep and living. What can we do to better understand the connections between our sleep and the conditions or scenarios that produce it? What creative approaches can we develop to investigate, find solutions for, or simply inhabit the discomfort determined by lack of sleep? We understand each artwork as a fragmented and poetic attempt to produce and share knowledge about sleep collectively. Each embraces radical approaches to research and health. Each also offers a space for the cross-pollination of ideas, identities, and forms – between design and contemporary art – across sleep-related fields of study.

    Sleep and
    Ageing

    view the collection

    Sleep and
    Parenting

    view the collection

    Sleep and
    Menopause

    VIEW the collection

    Read the Exhibition’s Catalogue

    Click to Read The Catalogue
    Reimagining Sleep catalogue

    For an accessible, text-only version of the catalogue, please click here.

    All the artworks on display are co-produced by Chiara Dellerba in collaboration with project participants and licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. A special thanks to artist Kamal Joory and Paper Crane Poets for their kind collaboration and creative inputs.

    This online exhibition, curated by Chiara Dellerba, is part of the wider Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and Its Disorders project, run in partnership with The Sleep Charity and funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Enrichment Public Engagement Grant led by Dr Diletta De Cristofaro.

    Hosted by Northumbria University, the Understanding and Reimagining Sleep and Its Disorders project consists in a collaboration between Dr De Cristofaro, who is the project’s Principal Investigator, the team at the Northumbria Centre for Sleep Research directed by Prof Jason Ellis, The Sleep Charity, and artist Chiara Dellerba. Special thanks to Prof Jason Ellis, Vicki Beevers, Lisa Artis, Dr Pam Alfonso-Miller, and Dr Greg Elder for their expert input and to the project Research Assistant, Dr James Rákóczi, for his support throughout.