sleepwalkers
Doug Aitken; Klaus Biesenbach and Peter Eleey, curators
January 16-February 12, 2007
The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street
Image: Doug Aitken
Mirroring the pulsating rhythms and energies of the city, Doug Aitken’s sleepwalkers was a multiscreen cinematic art experience that integrated film projections with the architectural fabric of its environs. Noting that “the city is about communication,” Aitken responded by transforming the concrete, glass, and brick of The Museum of Modern Art’s façade into a fluid mesh of interlacing narratives. While the films suggested an inner life of the buildings, they also reclaimed modern architecture for personal expression and imbued anonymity with fluid human presence.
The film itself depicted the nocturnal journeys of five characters representing city dwellers—a bicycle messenger, an electrician, a postal worker, a businessman, and an office worker. As they moved from the solitude of their personal and professional lives into the chaotic and rich interrelationships of their urban existences, the characters’ individual narratives were juxtaposed on different surfaces of the Museum’s exterior, with moments of parallel synchronicity in their movements emphasizing both the solitude of their lives as well as their membership in the same urban community.
In collaboration with MoMA, the project was the artist’s first large-scale public artwork in the United States and was the first to bring art to the newly renovated museum’s exterior walls.