Who runs our dreams?
The question is less an inquiry than an unsettling whisper. Dreams often feel like our most private spaces, where fragments of memory, desire, and childhood residue. Yet Anna Zachariades opens a space where these intimate landscapes collide with the collective forces that shape them. Her work reveals how dreams are never entirely our own, but permeated by advertising, social media, technology, artificial intelligence, political anxiety, and the weight of global crises.

Her supersized lollies, cast in sugar and each encasing a fossil, merge childhood nostalgia with the cheap sweetness of late capitalism. Sugar, fleeting and disposable, meets the permanence of the earth’s history. The fossils, ordered online at Amazon and delivered like any other product, lose their sublime aura in the banal flow of consumerism. Can something millions of years in the making really be consumed like candy? The absurdity lingers, urging us to ask, how do we consume the world, and its history?
Childhood echoes run throughout the exhibition – sandcastles, paper houses, playful fragments that surface like dream images. They remind us that the past is never sealed away. It rises again in moments of collective fragility, when climate catastrophe, political unrest, and social fracture leave us searching for meaning.
In Unconscious Happy Hour, Zachariades draws on the Rorschach test, a psychological tool from the 1920s and 30s designed to probe the unconscious. By reimagining its ambiguous inkblots in playful, sugar-like forms, she exposes the entanglement of psychoanalysis with the rituals of late capitalist pleasure. The “happy hour” becomes a paradoxical space where collective enjoyment and escapism mask deeper psychic costs, echoing how dreams and desires are shaped by forces outside ourselves.

Zachariades’ exhibition does not offer answers but holds up a mirror, one that is both gentle and disquieting. To ask Who runs our dreams? is to confront the fragile negotiations between dream and reality, respect and consumption, self and society. Her works invite us to slow down, to wait for the tilting moment of realization, and to reconsider what lies unseen beneath waking life. How might our dreams look if they were not saturated by the unsettled world we inhabit today?


Text: Dr. Luisa Seipp