Dream Decay: When Memory Becomes Myth

I’m returning to Malta for a collective exhibition, presenting Dream Decay: AVUS

Tomorrow I travel to Malta for a collective exhibition I’ve been anticipating for months. Even though I used to live there and know what to expect, the date still managed to arrive quietly, almost unnoticed amid everything else happening in my life. There’s a strange kind of calm that comes even though travel preparation has become immediate.

Dream Decay: AVUS (cropped)

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My contribution to the exhibition is part of an ongoing body of work titled E Pluribus Unum, through which I’ve been trying to piece together pieces of family stories and struggles through use of myth as a way to narrow the scope of this multi-generational legacy. This process has become a way of coping with my own mortality and mental predisposition as the sum of all these parts.

What I'm Bringing to the Table

For this exhibition, I’ll be showing Dream Decay: AVUS, a work centered on my grandfather and his decline in health with dementia. It began with a piece of research I stumbled upon months ago: evidence suggesting that certain centers of the brain can remain active for several seconds after recorded death. That idea unsettled me. I kept thinking, "What if those final seconds are experienced as a dream, or a replay of memory, or a moment of confusion between the two?"

Reports of near-death experiences describe panoramic life reviews, strange lucidity, and dreamlike sequences of memory. The science around it is uncertain, but the possibility stayed with me: that the brain might, in its final moments, create one last story for itself.

That led me back to my grandfather. His dementia has been a slow dissolution of narrative, the gradual erosion of memory and coherence. Watching this process has made me think about what it means to lose the internal story that defines you. The term Dream Decay emerged from that reflection: it describes both the fleeting nature of dream recollection and the deeper fading of memory itself.

In dreams, the brain renders without sensory input. It builds images out of fragments such as emotions, memories, impressions, and fills in the gaps imperfectly. Sometimes what we experience in dreams feels vivid and complete; other times it’s unstable, shifting, full of static. That inconsistency has started to feel like a metaphor for how memory disintegrates under dementia: a world continuously reassembled, never fully intact.

Personally, I’ve often lost a whole dream within seconds even though I consciously reach for details that dissolve as I try to hold onto the small bits I have left. That same frustration, that small grief of forgetting, feels like an echo of what my grandfather might live with daily, though on a scale I can only imagine, and ever declining.

Working on Dream Decay: AVUS has become an act of empathy for the human condition of remembering and forgetting, holding on and letting go. It’s also changed how I think about abstraction: not as a way of hiding meaning, but as a way of holding what can’t be said directly.

See You Soon

Returning to Malta to show this work is very exciting. I know I just left in August, but I miss my beautiful art community there, even though the Vienna art scene is immense. I’m curious to see how this piece will exist there, among other works and artists, in a space that once was my home.

Tonight, everything is packed. The work is finished for now, though I suspect it will continue to evolve in thought long after the exhibition ends. Tomorrow, I’ll see how it stands in the light of another place.

IF you are in Malta on October 17th, 2025, the opening night will be at Gemelli Gallery from 7pm and runs to October 25th