In Ion, Plato likens the Muse’s influence to a magnetic force: one that enchants and enchains, passing divine inspiration from gods to poets, from poets to performers, and finally to audiences through a “chain of iron rings”, in which “the Muse is the magnet and the poet the first ring.” Possessed by this force, the poet becomes en-theos—literally “inhabited by god”—a passive vessel caught in a chain of ecstatic transmission. In mythological accounts, this divine transmission is also described as the nectar the Muse places on the poet’s lips, making his verses sweet to the ear and irresistible, entwining Muse and artist into a quasi-erotic bond.

The exhibition after sleeping muse revisits this magnetic chain from the other end, reconsidering the traditional dynamics of authorship and gendered projections of the feminine that have long defined the Muse’s role in art, literature, and film. What follows when the Muse is no longer a conduit for someone else’s vision, but awakens as the subject herself?

Presenting work by nine women artists—Billie Clarken, Sarah Entwistle, Anna Kott, Jung A Lee, Alex Müller, Magda Stützer-Tóthová, Sandra Tirre, Halveig Villand, and Alungoo Xatan—the exhibition repositions the Muse as an active and self-determined presence, addressing themes of agency, gender, desire, and perception across various media. Inviting multiple interpretations in relation to bodily and self-representation, the works move between personal experience and broader sociocultural frameworks. They engage with the notion of the Muse not only as a source of mysterious, intuitive guidance, but also in her enduring portrayal as an object of desire onto which external ideals and fantasies are projected. 

Within the exhibition space, tensions between beauty and threat, softness and brutality are articulated through hybrid objects such as combs fused with the form of brass knuckles, and domestic items reappropriated into fetishised forms—each unsettling the boundaries of gender, power, and form. As bodily contours dissolve into landscapes and abstract compositions on canvas, the female nude is contested as a site of power: reclaimed, merged with natural forces, and reimagined as an active force of creation. In parallel, desire, and the cultural codes and norms that shape it, is explored through the material language of consumer culture, where femininity appears as a performed ideal and mediated fantasy. These material interventions extend into conceptual strategies, where hierarchies are dismantled, perception subverted, and authorship deliberately obscured.

As cultural narratives evolve, so too does the Muse: beyond her traditional role as a source of inspiration, she has come to embody foresight, wisdom, and empowerment, resonating with a plurality of female archetypes. It is in this spirit that the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the Muse. The notion of the reclining, “sleeping muse” gives way to a moment of awakening: not only a shift in time, but in perspective—from passivity to voice, from object to subject. Through this lens, the magnetic chain of inspiration is not severed, but redirected.