Episode 59: Jem Noble's Dream Dialects

"How does entanglement in the technical circuits of ‘progress’ shape not just dreams, but the capacity to dream?" In this pod guests Judy Darragh and Scott Hamilton join Mark Amery to discuss Dream Dialects, an exhibition by British artist Jem Noble recently installed at Te Tuhi, Auckland, which responds to the New Zealand film Sleeping Dogs (1977), directed by Roger Donaldson, and to the novel Smith’s Dream (1971), by C. K. Stead, on which the film is based. Both the novel and film tell a fictional tale of an insidious authoritarian power supplanting liberal democracy under familiar mantras of economic crisis and national security. Dream Dialects takes the contemporary resonance of this story as a starting point to consider the media through which narratives circulate and how they affect the nature of subjectivity and its capacity for political action.