Leah Clements

Collapse, 2019

Content Warning: Contains verbal reference to an armed robbery

Collapse is a film work formed from the voices of people who fall asleep in times of stress, anxiety, or danger. In it, we hear these seven voices describing when the sensation started happening, the circumstances in which it happens, and how it feels. These are accompanied by footage shot in thermal imaging, half outdoors and half at a sleep clinic where the artist was being tested for narcolepsy. It is interested in the act of collapse in the face of untenable circumstances as a form of resistance, a physical way of saying ‘No’, though a complicated and involuntary one.

While the work itself is not explicitly about the history of thermal imaging, it resonates with the medium’s longstanding association with observation and control. Thermal imaging has historically revealed what is normally hidden—our inner temperatures, patterns of life, traces of presence—and in doing so, transforms something deeply intimate into a visible, legible form. The sleep clinic setting in Collapse amplifies this tension, turning the act of rest into a site of scrutiny and measurement. In contemporary life, many people struggle to sleep—not solely because of medical conditions, but because neoliberal capitalism fragments time, erodes boundaries between work and rest, and demands constant productivity. Sleeplessness becomes a visible symptom of social and economic pressures, an embodied distress that is both intimate and political. By tracing these restless nights, Clements’ work sheds light on how our most private, vulnerable moments—our warmth, our quiet pulses, our nightly rhythms—are shaped, constrained, and unsettled by the relentless pressures and uncertainties of the world. Sleep, in this context, ceases to be  a quiet refuge, and is presented as a form of escapist coping strategy.

FEVER STATE
October 4–12, 2025

EXHIBITORS
Szilvia Bolla, Leah Clements, Viola Fátyol, Barbara Hammer, Rowena Harris, Magdaléna Kašparová, Phelim Hoey, Barnabás Neogrády-Kiss and Jo Spence

CURATORS
Judit Szalipszki and Flóra Gadó

VENUE
Holešovice Market, Hall 13
Bubenské nábř. 306, 170 00, Prague 7 Holešovice

OPENING HOURS
10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.