Detail from the installation by Paul Scerri & Exhibition poster

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Matthew's Dream (The Cloud of Unknowing)

An installation by Paul Scerri

Curated by Gabriel Zammit with associate curator Andrew Borg Wirth

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​It is a well-known fact that our dreams follow archetypal patterns that cut across time and culture. Dreams are a rupture in the process of understanding the world because they contradict everyday notions of time and space, but at the same time they also contain strange and deep truths, both personal and collective. 

Tumbled through the non-rational operation of synapses firing at night meaning-making within dream states taps into something deeply human. Childhood and adulthood exist side by side, collectivity and individuality, self and other, memory and fabulation, all weave together into a complex tapestry that incorporates itself into the edges of our imagination and sits at the bedrock of everything which we can call ourselves. 

Paul Scerri works through these ideas in Matthew's Dream (The Cloud of Unknowing). The cloud of unknowing is a spiritual concept originating from a 14th Century Christian mystical text by an anonymous English author. It represents the idea that there are certain truths that are beyond human comprehension and can only be approached when intellectual reasoning is relinquished. Transposed into a secular context the cloud of unknowing symbolises the grappling with uncertainties that cannot be fully articulated. In this space of ambiguity, dreams offer a fertile ground for revealing truths that emerge from the depths of the unknown.