When Sleep was finished, I had a rough idea of how it should exist in the world.
Not a cinema. Not a TV screen. Something more like a room you can actually be in. I imagined it projected onto a bed, or onto a wall above a bed. A space where someone could walk in, lie down, and just… be there with it. Possibly fall asleep. That felt right. The film is eight hours long. Eight hours is approximately one night’s sleep. These facts are not a coincidence.
So I printed some letters, made some DVDs, and sent them to galleries. I proposed showing it on a TV in a corner, or projected onto bedsheets, or in some other setup that allowed the work to do what I thought it was trying to do. I explained the concept. I included the disc.
Nobody replied.
I’m not bitter about this. Unsolicited DVDs from unknown Finnish artists probably arrive in a certain kind of pile, and that pile does not typically lead to exhibitions. I understand this. It’s fine.
Then, at the end of 2014, a curator from IFFR — the International Film Festival Rotterdam — called. That was different. Rotterdam happened in 2015. The film screened. Real people watched it, or at least were in the same room as it. Some of them may have fallen asleep. I hope so.
Now, in 2026, Sleep has been selected for Anozero’26 – Bienal de Coimbra, curated by Hans Ibelings and John Zeppetelli. It will be projected in a room inside the Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova — a 17th-century monastery. The installation is called Three Rooms. The other room belongs to Chantal Akerman.
And here is the part that got me: the monastery room, outside of exhibition hours, can be booked as a hotel room. You can sleep there. Inside the film. In a monastery.
This is closer to what I was describing in those letters than anything that has happened to the film before.
Christopher Costabile, who wrote his master’s thesis about Sleep at the University of South Florida, gave a comment, when he heard about the selection. He pointed out something from his paper that I had not thought about in exactly this way. He mentioned that Kiarostami advocated falling asleep to films — that it actually indicates something positive about the work. That the film is comfortable, like an old friend. That the films he couldn’t fall asleep to were the jarring, undesirable ones.
I like this.
The film started as a technical experiment — could I actually do the eight hours Warhol couldn’t? Yes, it turned out. Barely. The DVD pushed the limits of what a single-layer disc could hold. But beyond the technical question, I always felt the work was trying to do something that required duration, patience, and a certain kind of surrender from whoever was with it. A monastery room you can sleep in seems like the appropriate conclusion to that idea.
It took about thirteen years and a roundabout route through Rotterdam, a YouTube ban, a viral moment, and an academic thesis to get here.
But here it is.
The film is being shown how I imagined it. Nobody replied to the letters. And then, eventually, a monastery in Portugal did.
Anozero’26 – Bienal de Coimbra, To Hold, To Give, To Receive April 11 – July 5, 2026 Mosteiro de Santa Clara-a-Nova, Coimbra, Portugal
Leave a Reply