Tragic, comical, or absurd are all words that could be used to describe the particularities of Barbora Kleinhamplová’s (b. 1984, Liberec/Prague) Sleepers, a play made with both actors and amateurs, in collaboration with Tereza Stejskalová (b. 1981, Prague). It loosely enunciates the conditions we face in the present day as a capitalist society, specifically the lack of sleep and its social repercussions. As one of the first characters mentions, through the decades we have progressively slept less and less, which, in turn, characterizes and differentiates a successful individual from the rest. In the film, the characters are participants, either actively or not, in a protest. They demand – perhaps of their supervisors at work, the government, or simply as a cry to fellow non-sleepers – more hours of rest a day. The protest goes on from diverse viewpoints, and shifts between the real and humorous. Many of Kleinhamplová’s works take on this paradox, and are usually inspired by actual events.
Kleinhamplová’s artistic practice intertwines film, photography, installation, and theater while also residing in the collaborative and performative. For many of her works the artist invites participants from different fields and disciplines to aid in the conception or making of the works. She is interested in the current economic conditions and psychological consequences of living in a hyper-capitalist civilization, such as labor, debt, sleeplessness, and our addictive and problematic relationship to technology. JV
self-presentation:
Barbora Kleinhamplová was influenced by her studies of fine art and hypnosis and by her stay in New York City during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2012.
She likes Bertolt Brecht's drama. She tried to look for a link between the tragic act of Olga Hepnarová (Czech mass killer) and David Graeber's writing of Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
She likes Konstantin Melnikov's Sonata of Sleep and Jonathan Crary's book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. She was mesmerized by the mystery illness which appeared in the village of Kalachi in northern Kazakhstan, were people constantly lived in fear of uncontrollably falling asleep. She examined sleep and sleeplessness during her residency in South Korea in 2015.
She was influenced by experiencing the war in Ukraine during her residency in Kiev in 2014, and by spending couple of days in the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais, France in 2015.
Tereza Stejskalová lives in Prague, Czech Republic. She was eight when the Velvet Revolution took place. She went to open-air rave parties in her twenties. She studied Swahili and went to Tanzania. She read Bartleby by Herman Melville and saw Melancholia by Lars von Trier. She has become openly left-wing after reading Slavoj Žižek. She considers herself a feminist.
