ぐっすり　

Gussuri is a series of 20 still images responding to a lineage of trans-national Japanese works on sleep. This lineage ranges from the exploited sleep of Kawabata Yasunari's House of the Sleeping Beauties, to the unexploitable labor of sleep in Johnathan Crary's 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, and back to Wakagi Shingo's film adaptation of Shirakawa Yofune, a Banana Yoshimoto story about an uncontrollably lethargic young woman, Terako.

Sohrabi takes the questions that these works pose, and places them in their own backyard of Alameda, California, in locales that show the traces of work that once was, left to sit for years if not decades: their childhood bedroom, an abandoned naval base, and a beach overlooking the San Francisco skyline. At times, Sohrabi's body echoes Terako's nearly lifeless figure in sleep, vulnerable, but perhaps more notably, insistently, defiantly, sleeping. As Japanese film scholar Dr. Kimberly Icreverzi adds, "If the women in [these texts] are all too available, [Sohrabi's] body is at once accessible and draws attention to the ways we do not gain access to bodies and what kinds of bodies, especially the ambivalent, ambiguous, interstitial or trans* so often are not made accessible, are beyond view, or more often than not, simply expunged from the record"

The piece was originally shown in San Diego, where in conjunction to a slideshow of the images, Sohrabi dropped to the floor and slept for the duration of the slides.