Haytham el-Wardany

Lisa Tan: Dodge and/or Burn is conceived as a continuation of the artist’s eponymous solo exhibition at Accelerator gallery, Stockholm. Inspired by a drawing made by the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks representing the physiological organization of migraines, Tan created a system of “open walls” for viewers to navigate. Her attention to “the intersection between the nervous system and interior life as a way of examining how art operates, uncertainty, and the formation of the self” is deepened in the publication thanks to the essays of three authors whose work has affected Tan’s thinking. Psychoanalyst Charlotta Björklind and artist Asier Mendizabal analyze the overlapping of inner and outer life, the misalignment of subjective experience from representations of it, and negotiations between mind and brain, while the narration of writer Haytham el-Wardany meditates on the breath between words. Throughout the book, at the top of the pages, runs a transcription of the voice-over monologue from Tan’s video Dodge and Burn (2021–23).

Vad är sömn och vad gör den med de sovande? Är den individuell men inte personlig? Kan en kollektiv dröm föras in i sömnens sfär och få ett eget liv? I efterdyningarna av den arabiska våren söker Haytham El Wardany svar på frågor som blivit akuta under protesterna på Tahrirtorget i Kairo, där demonstranterna sov tillsammans natt efter natt. Vad händer när människor sover på allmän plats, när de blundar inför reklamtavlornas budskap och drömmer sig bort, eller när de lägger en amulett under kudden, trotsar uppmärksamhetssamhällets krav på ständig tillgänglighet och somnar mitt på dagen? Sömnboken är en poetisk essä som i korta kapitel undersöker sömnens potential och dess koppling till motstånd, förändring och revolution. Haytham el-Wardany, född 1972 i Kairo, är numera bosatt i Berlin. Sömnboken skrevs 2013 och publicerades första gången 2017. Nu introduceras el-Wardany för svenska läsare." . . . en teoretiskt och litterärt tätspunnen hybridtext som består av en rad korta filosofiska essäer, poetiska tablåer, drömåtergivningar och manifestartade politiska fragment." Viola Bao, Dagens Nyheter." . . . vacker och radikal på en och samma gång." Anne Ighe, Flamman.

Now in paperback, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. What is sleep? How can this most unproductive of human states—metaphorically called death’s shadow or considered the very pinnacle of indolence—be envisioned as action and agency? And what do we become in sleep? What happens to the waking selves we understand ourselves to be? Written in the spring of 2013, as the Egyptian government of President Mohammed Morsi was unraveling in the face of widespread protests, The Book of Sleep is a landmark in contemporary Arabic literature. Drawing on the devices and forms of poetry, philosophical reflection, political analysis, and storytelling, this genre-defying work presents us with an assemblage of fragments that combine and recombine, circling around their central theme but refusing to fall into its gravity. “My concern was not to create a literary product in the conventional sense, but to try and use literature as a methodology for thinking,” El Wardany explains. In this volume, sleep shapes sentences and distorts conventions. Its protean instability throws out memoir and memory, dreams and hallucinatory reverie, Sufi fables and capitalist parables, in the quest to shape a question. The Book of Sleep is a generous and generative attempt to reimagine possibility and hope in a world of stifling dualities and constrictions.