Ema Gaspar, ‘Please, Sleep’
Goswell Road, 22 rue de l’Échiquier, 75010 Paris, France
Exhibition 30 November 2024 – 25 January 2025
Open Thursday – Saturday 14H – 18H
“It all begins with becoming-girl. But becomings are layered, one nestled tightly into another all the way down, and to pull on a skirt is already to begin to become a flower.” [1]
Amy Ireland & Maya B Kronic, Cute Accelerationism, p.24
For her first solo exhibition in France, Ema Gaspar (b.1993 Almada, Portugal) summons a menagerie embodying sleep as a refuge, a place where intimacy and vulnerability can exist safely—momentarily—shielded from the outside world, in the absence of waking consciousness.
“In my waking life, each moment presents an opportunity for exposure, for my innermost thoughts and creations to be judged, dissected, and exploited. Here, the final moment before sleep overtakes me, I manifest that threshold, the moment I retreat inward and find solace in my interior world. Here, I scatter myself across media, each piece a fragment of my endeavour to create a sanctuary amidst confusion and trauma, a space where I can rest and reject—if only briefly—a world that constantly demands my compliance.” Gaspar, November, 2024
The works presented a Goswell Road draw on the tensile, fragile trust negotiated between the natural world and humanity. Morphemes of flora, biomes, leaves, and other natural elements cannot communicate with us traditionally; they co-exist, and become exposed and reliant on us to comprehend them. Gaspar sees this as the ultimate form of vulnerability. Her works merge natural forms with feminine, doll-like features—figures that embody a quiet strength and innocence combined with the complex vulnerability imposed upon them by patriarchy’s judgement of feminine forms—giving them agency.
In “Please, Sleep,” you are invited to enter her protected environment and contemplate the tensions of vulnerability, trust, longing, and belonging. This is a moment of respite. This is a place of coexistence and relief suspended in a bead of quiet before we drift into the safe haven of delirious, delicious sleep.
This exhibition was made possible with the support of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation—Delegation in France, which co-financed it as part of the EXPOSITIONS GULBENKIAN (edition #5) programme to support Portuguese art in French art institutions and spaces.
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Bio: Ema Gaspar (b.1993) is a visual artist from Almada, Portugal, who lives and works between Tokyo (JP) and Lisbon (PT). Drawing from her lived experiences, she conjures an ‘atmosphere of memory’, beginning with a shape or object, assigning it a personality, and inventing its body.
[1] Amy Ireland & Maya B Kronic, Cute Accelerationism, published by Urbanomic, 2024, Distributed by MIT Press.