Empire of Dreams

The origins of the ‘Empire of Dreams’ project date from 1988, when Sergey Bratkov first sewed two quilt covers from the sheets of photo fabric manufactured at this period. They represented a collage of recurring scenes from his dreams. Both then and now Bratkov transforms the quilt cover into a kind of screen where fragments of dreams and memories are projected. But the new project is less subjective: here there is virtually no trace of manual labour and personal dreams are replaced by collective memories whose storyline is now separate but recognisable events from late- or post-Soviet years.

Mass production of quilt covers only commenced after the Second World War. ‘For me this is not merely a question of design, but also a necessity to rapidly erase the horrors of dreams engendered by the trauma people endured,’ the artist says. The ‘manufactured’ look of his objects with yawning geometric apertures in the form of rectangles, rhombi, squares and circles emphasises the mass character and scenic monotony of dreams, apart from any cultural reference to modernist aesthetics, and we are confronted by desires for harmony and beauty that were displaced by history and reality, in Freudian terminology the ‘task of the dream’. However, Bratkov’s authorial stance — now, as then — is by no means straightforward: he has the ability to establish an analytical distance from the object, yet never becomes a lofty observer indifferent to the captured reality.

14 duvet covers. Print on fabric. 300 x 200 cm