Mara Experiences

20 February – 14 March 2008, opening Thursday 19 February, 6 – 8pm
Artist Talk Thursday 12 March, 12.30 – 1.30pm
Gallery 1

‘Mara Experiences’, often called ‘Sleep Paralysis’, describes the moment when a dream becomes a nightmare, during which we cannot move our body and we experience ‘night terrors’. The nightmarish logic of the dream is that it creates the sense that it is reality. That is, during the dream, we perceive the dream as real. This is a surreal state, but also an imaginary one.

Sleep paralysis creates despair because we cannot control anything in the reality of the dream. Especially when the dream repeats itself several times, we cannot escape this ‘night terror’, and we feel lost between the dream and reality.

DongWoo Kang was born in South Korea. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) in 2007 and is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts.