Here Ends in Sleep. Drowsy reflections on Ada Güvenir’s oeuvre.

Ada and I met for the first time in 2020 to talk about a tattoo. I had sent her a sentimental message on Instagram a little earlier, after seeing Would You Please at Film Fest Ghent and being completely swept away by it. The film, a precise portrait of loneliness and, at the same time, an ode to bumbling, loving, messy closeness, is wordless and yet it moved me – me, who clings so tightly to language. Perhaps that was what gripped me so strongly: the way she managed to compel viewers into attention, without dialogue, without slapstick, but with a tender narrative that unfolded like a chain of languid fireworks, confetti and stylised drawings.

She replied to my message. I asked whether she was still tattooing, and she was. We drank coffee on a cold but sunny autumn day. Covid numbers were rising again; we were careful, washing our hands, keeping our distance. She showed me a few sketches she had made for a possible tattoo. We talked for a long time – and we’ve kept on talking ever since.

The tattoo didn’t happen until years later. We met at her flat in Genk and settled in the living room. There stood, alongside a dining table, a chair she had painted that looked as though it had come straight out of one of her drawings, plants, a shelf with books on dreams and animation – the focus of her doctoral research – and a wide sofa full of colourful cushions. She brought out stacks of sketchbooks for me to leaf through. I dived into the piles, and now a cow from Would You Please adorns my right arm.

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Ada Güvenir (1997) was born in Izmir. She grew up in that large Turkish city on the edge of the Aegean Sea, where boats have been docking for thousands of years and the air always seems laced with gulls. In those days she must have filled hundreds of pages with drawings in which you can already recognise her later work – the grinning, underlying humour that goes hand in hand with pared-down, recurring forms and a sharp eye for detail.

In 2015 she went on to study animation at KASK in Ghent. She also lived in London for a while. Today she lives in a large apartment building in Genk with her dog Kiri. Her neighbour Lies, and the Delhaize staff at the shop by the station, helped her feel at home in Genk. Her work as a doctoral researcher and lecturer at LUCA School of Arts, campus C-MINE, contributes to that as well. Here Ends In Sleep is her first solo exhibition.

The sketchbooks I leafed through in her living room have been carefully taken apart for the exhibition. They form a cross-section of what occupies her as an artist and a person. The fact that she cut the pages out one by one at that table beside the chair she painted, in order to show them to a wide audience, strikes me as typical of who she is: generous and dubitable. She does not want to make hermetic work, and she refuses to avoid ‘everyday emotions’ such as heartbreak, loneliness, irritation and anger. Her recurring character Olive carries all of them within her. At the same time, her work is anything but non-committal: the ideation may be dreamy and unrestrained, but in the execution everything is carefully thought through.

I once helped Ada cut paper. I am naturally shaky and clumsy; Ada is not. My little sheets were not always straight. She never mentioned it at the time, but afterwards I realised that she had re-cut my worst disasters. It mattered how the paper was cut, just as it matters which colours characterise a scene and how particular sketches are placed next to one another. I once read someone describe her work as naïve – meant as a compliment – but naïveté is airy floating, and that is not what characterises the extreme deliberateness that runs through her work.

That same meticulous approach applies to the dream scenes. The oneiric playfulness you see on screen – the seemingly loose, dreamy and unrestrained quality – is in fact carefully constructed. In a text about her work, she articulates that tension as follows:

“[…] I thought, dreams might as well be the most precisely calculated creation of a human brain. […]. And now... tell me, how to animate that? The precision and calculated nature of the illusion of animation perhaps makes it the perfect medium. Yet first dissecting and then creating a dream frame by frame, feels like an attempt in complete absurdity.”

Sleep runs like a red thread through Güvenir’s oeuvre. Pillows, moons and dream scenes recur in her sketches and films. But in Güvenir’s work, sleep is never merely carefree repose; it is just as much an inhospitable space, a longing, a drowsy wakefulness. For Here Ends In Sleep, she trades in her recurring character Olive for ‘the visitor’. In this exhibition space, every audience member is the protagonist. Because no matter how lonely one might feel while sleeping, we all sleep. Sleep is a shared experience, and that was one of the reasons Güvenir wanted to articulate an exhibition around it. She designed the show as an immersion in the drowsy edges of her work, addressing the viewer through an experience they know: sleep.

“On the 8th of August I turned 28 and as a birthday gift, my mother got all of the home videos from my childhood digitalised […] She sent me 6 hours of footage. I watched it all in one sitting and I became absolutely obsessed with them. It was so strange, so uncanny, so dream-like. I observed the behavior of my parents, the small gestures of emotions in my face, the nostalgic colours and muffly sounds of the past encapsulated in an mp4 file.”

Childhood is a sleepy time: the younger you are, the longer the recommended hours of sleep. Babies up to three months old are best off sleeping fourteen to seventeen hours a day. We spend most of our youth asleep; a study of sleep naturally turns to those early years. For the exhibition at C-Mine, Ada returns to the time when she had not yet read Lacan, but was already observing the world with eager eyes. Over video footage from her early childhood, she layered colour patches that swell, burst, and convey a sense of playfulness – these images are being shown for the first time in Here Ends in Sleep.

There is much that bursts in Ada’s oeuvre: familiar objects and events dissolve into lines and patches of colour, only to emerge elsewhere again. Would You Please, the film with which Güvenir graduated from KASK in 2020 – and for which she won a VAF wildcard – could just as easily have looked different. A few days before the deadline, when the script had essentially been finalised, she decided to disrupt the film with a dream scene. The dream does not provide a denouement; instead it ties new knots. Elements from earlier scenes reappear in it, stretched, distorted, pared down – altered.

Rather than striving for a hyper-realistic representation of the administrative misery faced by non-Europeans in Europe, Güvenir seeks in As If It Could (2023) to grasp that experience through dreamy images. All dream and sleep scenes in Güvenir’s films have a structuring function; they help the story by telling the story in another way. You need not decipher the dream itself; the dream helps you decipher the non-dream state.

“I was thinking less about animation technically as a medium to create but more as ways of possibilities to show and adjust the vision which is already there. Which maybe dreams do. Maybe that is the only law there is.”

“Par rapport à ce monde dans lequel nous sommes venus sans le vouloir, nous nous trouvons dans une situation telle que nous ne pouvons pas le supporter d’une façon ininterrompue”: thus Freud explains why we sleep. Güvenir, however, does not place sleep opposite life: her work is best read through the recognition that sleep, dreaming and waking bleed into one another. More than dark, Güvenir’s dreamlike works resist one-sided readings of precisely the dreamlike character of her work. Her stories are not only cute, anecdotal and imaginative – they are also suffused with empathy for the lonely, with a relentless attempt to pay attention to all that is alive, not just humans, and with a probing of the threads between individual mental health and structural forces that wear us down.

Writer Ursula Le Guin once described fiction as “[…] a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast stack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story.” These are the questions Güvenir continually works with – “what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast stack, this belly of the universe”. With this exhibition she clears a space under the duvet, so that viewers, sleepy or not, can daydream along.

Sixtine Bérard, in conversation with Ada Güvenir (since 2020). November 2025.