Schering Stiftung

Exhibition 

Installation view of the exhibition "Rehearsal Room", Nicole L'Huillier, the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, 2025

Installation view of the exhibition "Rehearsal Room", Nicole L'Huillier, the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, 2025
Photo: Gregor Gobec. MGLC Archive

Nicole L'Huillier

Rehearsal Room

Installation view of the exhibition "Rehearsal Room", Nicole L'Huillier, the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, 2025
Photo: Gregor Gobec. MGLC Archive

Nicole L'Huillier

Rehearsal Room

Duration:

April 24 – July 05, 2026

Exhibition opening:

Thursday, 23. April 2026, 6–9 p.m.

Opening hours:

Thursday and Friday, 2–8 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday, 12–8 p.m.

Venue:

Project Space Schering Stiftung
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 while.

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 spoken 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.

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Ouverture 

Performance — January 29, 2026

Listening session with Nicole L'Huillier + Nyksan as part of transmediale

Partners 

Rehearsal Room was produced in collaboration with the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, on view from June 6 to October 12, 2025.
An artist fellowship from the DAAD Arts and Media Program, financed by funds from the Federal Foreign Office, makes the residency of Nyksan, sound artist and artisitic collaborator, possible.
In cooperation with Deutsche Stiftung Schlaf.

36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts
DAAD
Deutsche Stiftung Schlaf

Nicole L’Huillier (b. 1985) is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from Santiago, Chile. Her practice centers on exploring sounds and vibrations as construction materials to delve into questions of agency, identity, collectivity, and the activation of a vibrational imagination. Her work materializes through installations, sonic/vibrational sculptures, custom-made (listening and/or sounding) apparatuses, performances, experimental compositions, membranal poems, and writing. She holds a Ph.D. in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT (2022). Her work has been shown at the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (2025), 14a Bienal do Mercosul (2025), 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024), Tabakalera Donostia (2025), Kunsthalle Bern (2024), Ming Contemporary Art Museum (McaM), Shanghai (2023), ifa-Gallery Stuttgart (2023), Bienal de Artes Mediales Santiago (2023, 2021, 2019, 2017), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2022), transmediale, Berlin (2022), Ars Electronica, Linz (2022, 2019, 2018), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (MAC), Santiago de Chile (2022), 6th Ural Industrial Biennale, Ekaterinburg (2021), and 16th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2018), among others.

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Adam Haar Horowitz, PhD, is a neuroscientist, designer, and founder of DUST, the company pioneering the field of Dream Engineering. His research explores how dreams shape memory, creativity, emotion, and wellbeing, and how emerging technology can safely and meaningfully interface with the sleeping mind.

Adam holds a PhD from MIT, where he co-created the first targeted dream-incubation devices at the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group. He is jointly affiliated with the Dream Engineering Lab at Université de Montréal’s Department of Psychiatry and Harvard Medical School’s Center for Sleep and Cognition. His work bridges neuroscience, mental health, and culture, appearing in Nature, Science, The New York Times, BBC, NPR, Stanford HAI, and global art institutions such as the MIT Museum, LUMA, Tribeca, and CPH:DOX. Through DUST, Adam leads a multidisciplinary team building tools that help people explore, understand, and shape their inner landscape through the science of dreams.

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Schering Stiftung

Unter den Linden 32-34
10117 Berlin

Telefon: +49.30.20 62 29 65
Email: info@scheringstiftung.de

Opening hours
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Thursday to Monday: 2 pm - 8 pm
Saturday to Sunday: 12 am - 8 pm
free entrance

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