Tamara Janes

The word "dream" originally designated a "deception". Yet this description falls short. Dreaming is a mental process of half-sleep. Depending on cultural and religious background, there are very different and often contradictory understandings and interpretations of dreams. Tamara Janes has conceived a fictive book on dream interpretation, with which she critically examines this diversity and randomness. Starting with her own photographic archive, she makes use of the associative method of text sampling, with which she combines statements from dream interpretations from various sources and uses these to create humorous, quirky, and bizarre neologisms. She finds the catchwords on the websites "deutung.de", "traumdeutung.ch", and "symbolonline.de". Through this fictive interpretation, the methods of dream analysis are taken ad absurdum.
Tamara Janes (b. 1980) lives and works in Bern, Switzerland. Following her undergraduate studies of photography in Zurich and New York, she completed her Masters at the University of Art and Design in Basel.