Nikita Gale: 99 DREAMS
Nikita Gale, 99 DREAMS, 2025.
teapots, mugwort, tea kettles, hot plates, Power and LED lighting system
Lighting Design: Josephine Wang
99 DREAMS, Nikita Gale’s first solo exhibition in Korea at Barakat Contemporary, centers on a newly commissioned, eponymous installation inspired by a dream. In the dream, the artist Nikita Gale encountered a work that closely resembled the one presented in this exhibition — bringing what was once seen in a vision into reality.
The exhibition occupies the threshold that opens onto the space of the unconscious. Where “100” symbolizes wholeness and order, “99” points to a state of deviation from that order: an open space where boundaries waver,
unfixed. This is a state that touches up against the realm of the unconscious, uncontained by the logic of consciousness. Nikita Gale, too, regards this 99-ness not as a condition of lack, but as an open fissure where subtle events unfold 99 DREAMS summons precisely these fragments and rhythms of the unconscious into the exhibition space, drawing the viewer toward that same threshold. Accompanying the exhibition is a publication containing 99 phrases pulled from Gale’s dream journal amassed over several years. The narrative quality of the phrases evokes the tension between the logic of dreams and the impulse to make sense of them in waking life.
