Sleep #2

A key figure in the new Romanian cinema, Jude presents a desktop video — a film made entirely from images recorded directly from a computer screen — composed exclusively of fixed audio and video shots of Andy Warhol’s tomb, taken from the EarthCam webcam that streams live 24 hours a day. He assembles an impressionistic montage, its texture shaped by the low resolution of the desktop recording, spanning the four seasons and observing everything that unfolds in that small patch of Pittsburgh cemetery: fans paying tribute to the iconic pop artist, maintenance workers tending the grounds, and wildlife darting among the tombstones. As the title suggests, the work is a homage to Sleep, Warhol’s 1964 fixed-camera film portraying poet John Giorno sleeping for over five hours. A meditation on time and gaze, the film is punctuated by quotations from Japanese haiku that, like a lullaby accompanying the artist’s eternal rest, evoke the fragility of earthly existence: “A fallen flower / Returns to the branch? / It was a butterfly” (Moritake).