Eddie Peake, A Dream Of A Real Memory

For CIRCA’s December 2020 commission, Eddie Peake presents A Dream of a Real Memory, a sixty-two-minute devised drama unfolding across Piccadilly Lights in daily two-minute episodes throughout the final month of the year. Set within an immersive green-screen cyclorama, the work follows three characters through a sequence of choreographed movements, gestures and encounters that hover between intimacy, performance and psychological projection. The film unfolds backwards.

Beginning at what appears to be its conclusion, with exhausted performers, smudged make-up and the visible traces of exertion, the work gradually moves towards its own beginning. As the month progresses, bodies become less fatigued, movements more assured and relationships seemingly less resolved. Cause follows effect. Consequences precede actions. The familiar logic of narrative is quietly dismantled.

This reversal is central to the work. Dreams and memories rarely present themselves as coherent records of reality. They distort chronology, collapse time and rearrange events according to emotional rather than rational logic. Peake adopts this condition as both subject and structure. The work unfolds within a space where recollection, fantasy and lived experience become difficult to distinguish from one another.

Questions of ambiguity and interpretation have occupied Peake’s practice for more than a decade. Working across performance, sculpture, painting, photography and moving image, he repeatedly explores the gaps between language and experience, examining the ways desire, identity, intimacy and power are communicated beyond words. Meaning in Peake’s work is rarely fixed. Instead it emerges through gesture, movement, atmosphere and the unstable dynamics that exist between bodies occupying the same space.

These concerns are intensified within A Dream of a Real Memory. Throughout the work, two performers circle one another through moments of attraction, conflict, tenderness and distance. Their relationship remains deliberately unresolved. The choreography invites viewers to construct narratives from fragments of physical interaction while simultaneously withholding any stable interpretation. Are we witnessing romance, performance, collaboration, manipulation or something else entirely? The work offers no definitive answer.

The appearance of a third figure complicates matters further. Peake himself enters the frame as filmmaker, exposing the apparatus through which the drama is being constructed. Cameras, rehearsals and moments of production become visible. The illusion of narrative is interrupted by reminders of its own fabrication. By collapsing the distinction between performer and observer, fiction and documentation, the work continually destabilises the viewer’s assumptions about what is real.

The green screen functions as a crucial participant within this process. Normally concealed within the production of film, television and advertising, it is presented here in plain sight. Occupying the entirety of the image, the vivid green environment becomes both stage and subject. A technology designed to facilitate illusion instead reveals its own mechanics. The backdrop remains empty, yet full of potential, a space awaiting projection.

Presented on one of the world’s most recognisable advertising screens, this strategy acquires an additional significance. Piccadilly Circus is a site dedicated to persuasion, where images compete constantly for attention by appealing to aspiration, desire and anxiety. Peake’s work inhabits this environment while quietly undermining its logic. Rather than offering certainty, it cultivates doubt. Rather than satisfying desire, it asks where desire originates. The work invites viewers to question not only the relationships unfolding on screen, but also the countless images that shape their understanding of reality beyond it.

The commission arrives at the end of a year in which much of life has migrated onto screens. Relationships have been sustained through digital platforms, performances experienced remotely and public encounters increasingly mediated through technology. Against this backdrop, A Dream of a Real Memory feels both timely and unsettling. It presents a world in which reality and performance become difficult to separate, where intimacy is simultaneously genuine and constructed, and where every image contains the possibility of illusion.

As 2020 draws to a close, Peake transforms Piccadilly Circus into a dream-like theatre of uncertainty. Moving backwards through time while progressing forwards through the month, A Dream of a Real Memory proposes that understanding is never straightforward. The closer we look, the more unstable reality becomes.

Eddie Peake is a British artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans performance, video, painting, sculpture, sound and installation. Renowned for creating immersive environments that blur the boundaries between physical and psychological space, his work explores desire, intimacy, power and the complexities of human relationships. Through a distinctive visual language that combines theatricality, humour and emotional intensity, Peake investigates the ways people communicate, connect and misunderstand one another.

Working across multiple mediums simultaneously, Peake often constructs exhibitions as interconnected networks of images, objects, sounds and performances. His practice is characterised by an interest in repetition, non-verbal communication and the limitations of language, examining how emotions, desires and psychological states frequently resist straightforward representation. Whether through choreography, moving image or sculptural intervention, his works reveal the often-unspoken tensions that shape social, romantic and personal encounters.

In 2020, Peake collaborated with CIRCA on A Dream Of A Real Memory, one of the platform’s earliest commissions following its launch in Piccadilly Circus. Presented nightly throughout December on London’s iconic Piccadilly Lights, the work transformed the vast advertising screen into an immersive green void occupied by three performers navigating a shifting landscape of attraction, conflict and self-discovery. Screened in reverse over thirty-one consecutive days, the sixty-two-minute work unfolded backwards from exhaustion to anticipation, mirroring the unstable logic of dreams and memories where chronology dissolves and reality becomes uncertain. By exposing the mechanics of image-making through the visible presence of a green screen, Peake challenged the conventions of cinema, advertising and public spectacle while transforming Piccadilly Circus into a site for collective reflection at the close of a year defined by uncertainty and isolation.

Presented during London’s emergence from lockdown, A Dream Of A Real Memory exemplified CIRCA’s founding ambition to reclaim public screens as spaces for artistic experimentation and shared experience. Accompanied by a fundraising campaign supporting refugees through Choose Love, the project connected artistic imagination with wider questions of care, solidarity and human connection during a moment of profound social change.

Peake’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Tate Britain, Whitechapel Gallery, Barbican Centre, ICA London, Palais de Tokyo and Kunsthalle Zürich. Through a practice that consistently pushes the boundaries of performance and visual art, he has established himself as one of the most distinctive voices of his generation, creating works that reveal the fragile, absurd and deeply human dynamics that underpin contemporary life.