Mia Isabel Edelgart
Sov (sleep), 2021
Video projection, colour, sound, 32 minutes, loopSleep/Sov is a thirty-two-minute video that inspects the challenge of sleeping for the public. The video interludes some monochrome footage of a webcam of the sheep barn with collages of random paintings of mainly children, women, and animals sleeping, unveiling how surveillance of animals is associated with human’s fascination with watching others in slumber, especially the gaze towards women. Sleep/Sov interweaves Mia Isabel Edelgar’'s practice ontology of motherhood and her detection of the deficiency of feminine viewpoints in the historical studies on sleep. Furthermore, Mia combines instrumental lullabies with the dialogue between her and people she randomly encountered in the park next to Møstings Hus in Copenhagen. This integration serves as the sound background to the visuals. She has asked a variety of questions regarding sleeping privacy and the causes of insomnia, with people disclosing their personal stories of how work, relationships, and parenting can induce sleep deprivation and further psychological distress.
Mia’s research-based practice employs interviews and conversations as the methodology, challenging the dominion of the author’s agency by inviting strangers into the conversation and the making process. Developed during the Covid-19 pandemic, Sleep/Sov discusses how the quality of our sleep and our well-being is closely fused with the environment, social role, productivity and mental stress—a furtherer, to restructure our ways of thinking about work-life balance and care of our wellness.
About Mia Isabel Edelgart
Visual artist Mia Isabel Edelgart (b.1984, Denmark) works non media specified, varying between collective and singular processes. Her works unfold in relation to long-lasting research processes, often involving interviews in various ways. She has worked mainly from questions on interrelationality, feelings and reproductive work. Springing from an interest in relational intelligence, knowledge hierarchies and learning processes, Edelgart often works at the crossover of text-based information and situated experience-based knowledge. As a pivotal part of her practice she is engaged in various self-organized (art)schools and collectives as means of facilitating alternative spaces for learning, sensing and sharing. Edelgart is currently employed as an artist researcher at PASS (center for practice-based art studies) University of Copenhagen (2023-24)