R.E.M.X
Rapid Eye Movement

“No matter how fast you are, there’s always someone faster”

“R.E.M.X - Rapid Eye Movement” is the second edition of the Media Art Festival Arad. Our exhibition takes sleep as a point of departure, specifically Rapid Eye Movement sleep, a stage and state that it seeks to analyze, unpack, and deconstruct through the works produced by the invited artists.
The Media Art Festival thus continues, moving along its destination, searching for a fitting place. Before we get too bored of the White Cube, or disappear into the Black Box, we intervene, parasitizing, pollinating, dismantling, empathizing with the permanent collection of the art museum. Or, we infiltrate, occupy, and play, by opening a store in the heart of the town’s mall. Since the first edition of the festival in 2014 received enthusiastic visitors, although less numerous than we had hoped, this second time around we decided to move the art to the one place in town that is most beloved by its inhabitants: the Mall.
Organized by Arad City Hall and the Municipal Center of Culture, together with kinema ikon, BARIL Gallery, Atrium Mall Arad, and Art Encounters Foundation, R.E.M.X occasioned several exhibitions and events, as follows:

The main exhibit, the Mixed Store, brought on display the work of 80 Romanian and international artists. Located at Atrium Mall, the store was open daily between October 16 and November 14, 2015. On view in store space no. 112 on the 1st floor of the mall, were video, multimedia, photographic and sculptural installations, as well as video projections and sound works. Additionally our Mixed Store included several sub-sections or galleries: Cinemagic (screening experimental and authorial film), Radio Lounge (a group of sound interventions scattered throughout the space), The Bedroom (an architectural intervention by the group L’ENE), and salonvideo clip (a selection of 10 music videos coordinated by Daniela Pălimariu & Dan Basu, and guest curated by Bogdan /Hypno/ Moldoveanu). The full list of participants follows this short introduction.

The second location of the festival was the Arad Art Museum, Gh. Popa de Teiuș Street 2-4, 2nd floor, where the group kinema ikon, coordinated by George Sabau exhibited the second project from the series Wunderkammer: Apparatus, an installation that consisted of several pre-cinematic apparatus pieces transformed into interactive artworks.

The third location was in Timișoara, at the Casa cu Lei, Unirii Square 6, as part of the Art Encounters biennial. There, the entire festival was converted into a travel agency, a franchise of sorts, that promoted the artists from the exhibition in Arad via a series of press folders, one per artist: hence R.E.M.X - remixed.

In Avram Iancu Square, across the street from the alternative art space KF café the artist gH. spray-painted a light pole in pink – thus marking the city space, and creating a point of connection between the exhibitions that took place in Arad around the same time: R.E.M.X at Atrium Mall, kinema ikon at the Art Museum and First Cut at TEBA (the site of a former textiles factory in Arad).Also as part of the R.E.M.X project, we hosted a workshop for curators and critics, on October 17th. Under the title, Gesamtkunstwerk @ Mall or Pseudo- Dream Treatise, the participants reflected on the theme of the exhibition, in relation to the current context for the production and display of media art in Romania, and beyond. The workshop was planned in continuity with a roundtable discussion convened in the fall of 2014, Towards the Newly Untitled – Mixed Media and Combination Aesthetics, which was organized in conjunction with the exhibition R.A.M. Random Access Memory during the first edition of the Media Arts Festival in Arad. The texts written in response to the second workshop are published here, in the last section of the catalogue.

The fourth location materialized post-festum, with a version of the exhibition from the Mall traveling to the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, where it could be seen between November 16, 2015 and March 20, 2016 in the 2nd Gallery on the 3rd floor.

curators,
Calin Man, Ileana Selejan

key words 
R.E.M., Sleep, Sleeper, Lack of sleep, Sleeping pills, Consumerism, Sleepyness, Daydreams, Lucid dreams, Dreams, Dreamers, Nightmares, Visions, Revelations, Hallucinations, Apparitions, Order, Disorder, Sleep Apnea, Insomnia, Narcolepsy, Sleep walking, Sleep deprivation, Snoring, Yawning, Tiredness, Boredom, Fatigue, Siesta, The couch, The TV screen, The bedroom, The bed, Pillows, Blankets, Sex, Eroticism, Birth, Death, Reincarnation, Cryogenesis, The headrest (+ other sleep “utensils”)
remix, assemblage, apparatus, palimpsest, multi-tasking, cutting-up, montage, bricolage, recycling, merzbau, ready-made, sampler/ing, loop,  footage, mixed-media, multimedia, intermedia, hypermedia, new media 
video wall, radio lounge, installation, devices for happiness, fashion, money, franchise, computer, paradis, eclectic,  hybrid, fusion, mixing, melange, combination, mestisaje, melting-pot, pèle-mèle, compilation, miscellanea, melting/blending, overlap, adjacency, juxtaposition, composite, amalgamate, osmosis, symbiosis, synesthesia, kinesthesia, syncretism, encrustation/scratch, Ars Combinatoria
& art 4 all / art 4 mall.

Sleep. A final frontier. Or at least a frontier, of sorts. Trespassers are welcome, encouraged even, as this river meanders far and deep. From these often murky, sometimes clear waters, new threads will continue to emerge, as long as. Sleep is a point of entry, a border check, wherefrom open-ended questions can continue to. What if Oedipus had never run into the Sphinx? What’s more frightening, his blindness or his exile? What if tomorrow was night instead of day? Like vampires, we’d all be wandering around in the darkness, escaping from the light. 
Sleep blurs the boundaries between art and life, hypnotizing the audience, making me, us, you, them, 1, 2 … 3 ... all fall asleep. Have you ever wondered how many futures are indeed possible? I’ll say! Many more if we start counting dreams! Do you keep a journal of your dreams? If they are forgotten, sooner than memories, imagine how much CONTENT, imagine how many random points of access are lost. Please start recording. 
Buddhists place impermanence at the core of their beliefs. Existence is transient, they say, and in a constant state of flux. Being asleep should therefore, be just as important as being awake. I’ve had trouble falling asleep. I tried to count numbers, then sheep. I imagined blue skies and fuzzy clouds passing by. Violet images kept bleeding in. The Andalusian dog, hungry for its midnight snack. Do you see colors when you fall asleep? I see blue. Sometimes white. Soft pillows around my body. I worry I’ve never been fully awake. Do you? 
Would you like to play a game? Imagine a labyrinth, and inside, a library. We’re seated in one of the rooms, surrounded by rows upon rows of books. We’re both sleep deprived, and we know this could be just a dream. Avoid all who sleep badly and remain awake nights, the wise man told Zarathustra. 
Now, I want you to summon your memories of sleep. Think of Goya’s famous print, the poor man asleep at his desk, all the impossible creatures rising from the depths of his ignorance. Think of sleeping beauty, and of all the other sleepers. Of Bracusi’s sleeping muse. Of Peter Huyghe who made the hermit crab burrow inside the Sleeping Muse’s head. Blindfolded Surrealists, lost in the forest of symbols. Of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Think of the sleeping Buddha, and of how the universe is never fully asleep. Of our twenty four seven rhythms, of our lives turning with the clocks. 

Ileana Selejan



REM or Rapid Eye Movement sleep, is “a state of sleep that recurs cyclically several times during a normal period of sleep and that is characterized by increased neuronal activity of the forebrain and midbrain, by depressed muscle tone, and especially in humans by dreaming, rapid eye movements, and vascular congestion of the sex organs.”