Dates at a glance:
29 January 2026, 6–8 p.m.: Ouverture – Listening Session with Nicole L’Huillier and Nyksan
23 April 2026, 6–9 p.m.: Opening of the exhibition ‚Rehearsal Room‘
24 April – 5 July 2026: Exhibition open
Location: Schering Stiftung Project Space, Unter den Linden 32–34, 10117 Berlin
In spring 2026, the Schering Stiftung will present Rehearsal Room, an exhibition by Berlin-based Chilean artist Nicole L’Huillier. The title Rehearsal Room refers both to a space for practice and to a particular kind of acoustic environment. Using sound, artificial intelligence, and voices, L’Huillier transforms the exhibition space into an experimental zone. Upon entering, visitors are invited to collectively tune into the realm of dreams – as a form of another reality.
The sounds are selected and arranged to affect visitors; their brain activity and heartbeats resonate with the tones and frequencies in the room. This results in a threshold and synchronization space that offers both tranquility and retreat, allowing visitors to engage in new physical and cognitive experiences. To create this soundscape, the artist works with digitally generated sounds, sound frequencies, human voice, and field recordings, thus entangling natural and composed sounds with others created by artificial intelligence.
The composition which fills the space is, firstly, the product of the artist’s research into frequencies and sounds that, on the one hand, have a calming effect and, on the other, open up access to other states of consciousness. It is, secondly, the result of a close collaboration with producer and sound artist Nyksan, who, thanks to a collaboration with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, is invited to live and work in Berlin for a month.
The exhibition brings together three different zones: The first zone, a rest area, features the mentioned composition. An acoustic foam mat and pillows that produce soothing sounds, such as the purring of cats, gentle heartbeats, or the sound of ocean waves, help visitors focus their attention fully on the sounds surrounding them.
At the second station, dream narratives resound in the form of a whispering choir. The dream reports are based on material found in an online database. The whispering choir is, in a similar way, a digital–analog hybrid. It was created by the artist training a language-based artificial intelligence together with friends and family members. However, the AI was not trained with loud words, but with whispering sounds and hushed noises. In this way, the AI presents the individual episodes from a digital dream archive in a manner that not only sounds strange, not-fully-human, and rather uncanny, but also requires visitors to place their ears close to the respective loudspeakers. Only then is it possible to filter out narrative moments from within the whispering.
Finally, the third element brings together discussions with sleep research experts, including Prof. Dr. Björn Rasch, sleep researcher and expert in cognitive biopsychology at the University of Fribourg or Dr. Karen Konkoly, a postdoctoral fellow at the cognitive neuroscience lab at Nothwestern University. They share insights from their research, covering topics such as the health benefits of good sleep, the effects of sound frequencies on mental activity, and the potential of lucid dreaming to be used as a tool to learn more about sleep, dreams, and consciousness. Further contributions come from artists and practitioners exploring collective dreaming and dream sharing, including the French-Colombian artist duo Nomasmetaforas and the artist and poet Precious Okoyomon.
The exhibition was developed in close collaboration with dream and sleep researcher Dr. Adam Haar Horowitz. As a neuroscientist, he specializes in dreams and dream incubation, with a particular focus on so-called hypnagogic images – vivid mental images that emerge as one falls asleep. Through his scientific work and collaborative projects with artists, Haar Horowitz aims to raise awareness about the importance of dreaming, daydreaming, and the art of drifting off.
Rehearsal Room acts as both a sleep laboratory and an immersive space, centered on acoustic and vibrational elements. The exhibition invites visitors to a bodily listening experience and engage with unconscious processes and phenomena.
The exhibition will be curated by Christina Landbrecht, who is also the author of this text.
more details here
