Three Rooms

wo cells in the Santa Clara-a-Nova monastery have been transformed into rooms by night, and exhibitions during the day. A third cell has become a common lounge where visitors and guests can spend time together. The two rooms are furnished with a bed, a nightstand and a lamp, designed by the Biennial’s project team. In one room, Chantal Akerman’s "La Chambre" (1972) is shown on a television; in the other, a television plays Juha Lilja’s "Sleep" (2013), a homage to Andy Warhol’s eponymous film from 1963. Visitors can linger in the rooms and watch the eight hours of Sleep and the ten minutes of La Chambre. Guests can go to their room after the exhibition closes and are expected to check out before it opens again, unless they want to expose themselves while sleeping, as Lilja does in his film. The three rooms allow the exhibition to be inhabited, alluding both to the monastery’s history of inhabitation and to its uncertain future, given the dormant plans to transform the site into a hotel. Continuing the long and discreet surgical work that the Biennial team has been carrying out, since 2017.