ESCAPE ROOM
Curated by Naomi Lev
FLUCA // Austrian Cultural Pavilion

October 19 – November 18, 2018

You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run
Tried to hide

Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side, yeah

The Doors, 1966

There is a fine line between reality and imagination that we constantly attempt to walk. It is not always easy to determine where this line runs and which side of it we are on.
In this poetic collection of videos, the artists test the various boundaries between the fictitious and the real. Contemplating on physics, dreams, fairytales, voyages, and aspirations to fly, they all engage in a fantastic world that attempts to question and break known boundaries.

“How can I know that I am not now dreaming?” is the famous question René Descartes asked himself. Descartes claims that the experience of a dream could be indistinguishable from waking life; any subjective differences that exist between waking life and dreaming, are insufficient to assert we are not now dreaming. In response to that, philosopher John Locke claimed that the inability to sense pain in a dream is a way to distinguish what is real and what is not.

Do we not experience pain in our dreams?

Similar to dreaming, the phenomenon called an “Escape Room” provides a sensory stimulation that imitates reality. It gathers the participants in a semi-artificial environment that provokes conscious and unconscious behaviors.
Through dreams we recognize the escape room as a place within our own self. It is our imagination that captures us, and it is our imagination that frees us. All clues are available, and all outlets are conceivable.