"who runs our dreams?" -Anna Zachariades

Anna Zachariades – Who runs our Dreams

Who controls our dreams? The question is less a matter of dispassionate research than a quiet, unsettling whisper. Dreams appear as a hidden world within us, where fragments of memory, longing, and the echoes of childhood reside. But Anna Zachariades opens a space where these intimate landscapes collide with the invisible forces of the present. She reveals that dreams never truly belong to us. They are permeated by advertising and social media, by technology and artificial intelligence, by political anxieties and the shadows of global crises.

Their oversized, sugar-cast lollipops each contain a fossil. Childhood nostalgia merges here with the sweet temptation of late capitalism. Wasteful sugar meets the enduring power of Earth's history. Ordered and delivered from Amazon like any other commodity, the fossils lose their sublime aura in the endless stream of consumption. Can something formed over millions of years truly be consumed like cheap candy? This absurdity forces us to ask: How do we consume the world and the history that is sedimented within it?

Memories of childhood permeate the exhibition – sandcastles, paper houses, playful fragments that rise to the surface like dream images. They remind us that the past is never sealed away, but returns in moments of collective fragility. This is when climate catastrophe, political upheaval, and societal ruptures compel us to search for new interpretations.

In Unconscious Happy Hour , Zachariades takes up the Rorschach test, that psychological experiment from the 1920s and 30s created to access the unconscious. By transforming the ambiguous inkblots into sugar-like, playful forms, the artist exposes the entanglement of psychoanalysis and the rituals of late-capitalist pleasure. The "happy hour" thus becomes a paradoxical space where collective enjoyment and escapism obscure the deeper costs to the soul—an echo of how our dreams and desires have long been shaped by external forces.

Zachariades' exhibition offers no answers, but holds up a mirror to us, both gentle and unsettling. The question, "Who directs our dreams?" leads us to the fragile threshold between dream and reality, between devotion and consumerism, between self and society. Her works invite us to pause, to wait for the tipping point of realization, and to reconsider what lies hidden beneath the surface of our waking lives. What would our dreams be like if they weren't permeated by the upheavals of the world we inhabit today?

Dr. Luisa Seipp