24/7 review: Exhibition about sleep might keep you up at night

In Marcus Coates’s video Self-Portrait as Time (2016), the artist’s fingers apparently manually nudge his watch’s second hand, marking time. It’s an illusion: the artist merely follows its inexorable 60-step journey round the watch face. Coates performed this work for 12 hours. Watching it, even for three minutes, my response quickly shifted from amusement to a queasiness at time’s abstractness, its tyranny in our lives.

Curator Sarah Cook’s inspiration for 24/7 was Jonathan Crary’s 2013 book of the same name, which focused on human incompatibility with the “systemic imperatives of 21st-century capitalism”. And while there’s much darkness in the premise — our hyperactivity, our numb imprisonment by our gadgets, software and visible and invisible societal forces — Crary also identifies sleep as an “unconquerable” human response and source of optimism.

Rest is a form of resistance, a biological reminder of human agency. The collective Tekja’s installation Awake (2019) is emblematic: blizzards of live social media messages relating to sleep and sleeplessness projected onto screens, punctuated with prolonged pauses of meditative digital mandalas.

Some works evoke a dystopian present: Ubermorgen’s film of a Chinese crypto-mine is like descending into a digital inferno; Mat Collishaw’s installation with animatronic pigeons, an allegory of human addiction to reward, is like a waking nightmare.

But others resist apocalyptic narratives: Pierre Huyghe’s video The Housing Projects, with model tower blocks appears at first a grim essay in failed modernist social housing but the lights in the buildings seem to communicate, even dance to the techno soundtrack, a metaphor for human indomitability. Nastja Säde Rönkko, meanwhile, lived off the internet grid for six months and fostered a new community.

I left feeling troubled yet not despondent, teeming with thoughts and questions. Ironically, for an exhibition that advocates sleep as resistance and recuperation, 24/7 might keep you up at night.

Until Feb 23 (020 7845 4600, somersethouse.org.uk)