Radu Jude: Sleep #2

The Film Gallery is pleased to present Sleep #2, the first video installation by Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude. This exhibition marks Jude's entry into the field of gallery-based work and runs alongside a full retrospective of his films at mk2 Bibliothèque × Centre Pompidou (23 September - 11 October). 

Drawing on his rich and eclectic cinematic practice, Jude arranges the transition of his desktop film Sleep #2 (2024) from the cinema screen into the gallery. Conceived with extreme economy of means, Sleep #2 (2024) takes as its unlikely subject Andy Warhol’s gravesite in Pittsburgh, captured through a static EarthCam and reframed from the artist’s computer in Romania. What began as a conceptual pun on Warhol’s notorious durational film Sleep (1964) unfolds into a layered meditation on observation, duration, authorship, and mortality. Jude’s film is at once an homage, a parody, and an essay.

Presented across four screens corresponding to the seasonal structure, the installation invites viewers to drift between screens, attentive to repetitions, accidents, and the shifting textures of light and weather, just as the gravesite tourists drift in and out of the image. Warhol’s resting place becomes a stage for both everyday rituals and spectral appearances—a site where the banal and the profound constantly overlap.

The work also asks us to consider the status of the image today. Jude’s source material is a live webcam, an open and public form of surveillance. Tourists who perform gestures of homage at Warhol’s grave—posing for selfies, arranging soup cans, leaving flowers—unwittingly become actors in a global theater. Their visibility echoes Warhol’s promise of “fifteen minutes of fame,” while Jude’s reappropriation of these images situates the work in the lineage of found-footage cinema. In this sense, Sleep #2 speaks not only to Warhol’s legacy but also to the contemporary condition of ubiquitous cameras, where authorship is dispersed, and images circulate freely without origin or end.

A live webcam installed in the exhibition space will allow global internauts to attend the event, folding the gallery visitors into the logic of surveillance that underpins the work. Just as Jude captured images of strangers visiting Warhol’s grave, spectators here become part of the installation’s observation system—watched as they watch, their presence recorded and reflected. This additional layer situates the audience within the same field of visibility as Warhol’s visitors, blurring the line between artwork, subject, and spectator.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of discussions with critics and theorists on the film’s transition into the museum context; the full program is available on the gallery’s website.

A second exhibition by Radu Jude, The Exit of the Trains, developed with Adrian Cioflâncă in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, will open on October 9 at The Film Gallery.

This project is cofinanced by the Romanian Cultural Institute through the Cantemir Programme—a funding framework for cultural projects intended for the international environment.

Both video installations are made possible with the support of SBAE. 

In collaboration with: Centre Pompidou, Re:Voir, Cinéma L'Archipel, Kyralina, French Institute in Romania—Bucharest, Scena9, Films in Frame, East European Film Bulletin