From Disorder to I Will Sleep When I'm Dead: Jeanne Susplugas now

At some point in 2025 — the record gives the year of purchase but not the day — a virtual-reality work entered the collection of the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris under inventory number AM 2025-517: I Will Sleep When I'm Dead, 2020, seven minutes, catalogued as a three-dimensional work and a multimedia installation, technique "réalité virtuelle", edition 1/5 plus two artist's proofs, filed under the collection area Nouveaux médias. Nine years earlier the same artist had opened the 2016 season of a small photography gallery on rue Louvigny in Luxembourg City, in a space that no longer exists and whose website went dark in 2022. Of the eleven artists on that gallery's final roster, Jeanne Susplugas is the one whose institutional record has kept growing the fastest. This file traces the line between the two.

Luxembourg, winter 2016

Disorder – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (21 Jan – 5 Mar 2016), catalogued in this chronology as WPG.03, was the gallery's third documented exhibition and the opening of a season that would run through Emmanuelle Bousquet in March and Izumi Miyazaki in the summer. What survives of it is thin, and the thinness should be stated plainly: the exhibition page, captured on 29 February 2016, carried the title DISORDER, the label "07 Images" and a slideshow — no checklist, no dimensions, no price list. No installation photographs have been located in the public record. The show's contents therefore cannot be reconstructed here, and are not guessed at.

What the archive does hold is the gallery's own artist page, captured in February 2016, and it is more informative than the exhibition page. It listed Susplugas as represented by three galleries at that moment — Galerie Valérie Bach in Brussels, Mizuma Art Gallery in Tokyo, and Wild Project Gallery in Luxembourg — which places the Luxembourg room, briefly, inside a three-city commercial structure. It recorded her as a doctor of art history from Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, born in Montpellier, living in Paris, laureate of the Philips–Artsper contemporary art prize in 2015 and of the Prix Opline in 2013, the latter on a nomination from ORLAN. And it set out a selected solo history of twenty-five shows across fourteen years — from La maison malade at ARCO in Madrid in 2002, by way of Biepackzettel at Kunst-Werke in Berlin in 2003 and Peeping Tom's House at La Piscine in Roubaix in 2009, to Le Baiser du dragon at ESADHAR in Rouen in 2015 — with a separate list of catalogues reaching back to Alienation, Nikolai Fine Art, New York, in 2000.

The pharmakon and the house

The material Luxembourg was showing had a long and consistent shape. The gallery's own text dated her enquiry into the distortions of contemporary life to the late 1990s, and her signature object is the medicine box. La maison malade, dated 1999–2010 and of variable dimensions, is a room whose walls, floor and ceiling are covered in real pharmaceutical packaging, padded in the manner of a psychiatric isolation cell, which the visitor has to tread across to get through. The early titles run in the same register — Hypocondriaque at Mizuma in Tokyo and Dependence at MOCCA in Toronto, both 2003; Expiry date at the Passages art centre in Troyes, 2007 — and the Containers drawings, begun in 2007 after a stay in New York and modelled on the American prescription bottle, have run ever since. The Greek word usually invoked for this is pharmakon, remedy and poison in one term, and Susplugas used it as a title in the same year as Luxembourg: Pharmakon, with Irina Petrakova, at Galerie Iragui in Moscow, 17 February – 18 March 2016.

Two things in that body of work matter for what came next. Her houses were never architecture; they were containers for a nervous system, which is why one could be exchanged for a skull without any break in logic. And she had been treating drawing as a modular, sign-like vocabulary — closer to a pictogram than to a sketch — for years before the technology arrived that could put a viewer inside it.

Into the skull

I Will Sleep When I'm Dead was completed in 2020 after roughly a year's work, realised at a VR workshop in Arles with support from the CNC and an Orange XR grant. The viewer puts on a headset and descends into a brain: neurons and synapses, an endless maze, and objects that drift toward the face and can be activated by looking at them — a cookie-cutter house that spins and burns, a dog that snarls, pill bottles, a bomb, a snow globe, an open laptop displaying four lines of Emily Dickinson beginning "One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted—". There are more than thirty such activations. The three hundred–plus images were not invented: they were harvested from interviews in which people were asked what they were thinking, then redrawn as a common symbol set. Susplugas consulted neuroscientists while building it. The score is by Vincent Lagadrillière. It was authored in Unity and shown on Oculus Quest and Quest 2 hardware. Runtime is given as seven minutes by the Centre Pompidou and as six minutes forty by the artist's own caption.

The production credits are worth reading as infrastructure rather than as small print, because they explain the speed of what followed. The work was produced by Notoryou with EDIS, Chroniques and the CNC, and is distributed by Lucid Realities — an XR distributor, not a gallery. The Institut français records that same Orange XR support as an award made with the Fondation Beaumarchais/SACD, alongside a Best of French XR immersive contents award at Virtuality, both 2020; and the work entered the Institut français's IFdigital catalogue with a technical rider attached: solo experience, linear interactivity, no dialogue, VR headset required, technician required, minimum age ten. A painting travels on a crate list; this travels on a rider. It circulated accordingly: a solo presentation, I'll sleep when I'm dead, at La Patinoire Royale – Galerie Valérie Bach in Brussels from 10 September to 30 October 2021, then le Cube in Issy-les-Moulineaux from 13 January 2022, Art me at Galerie Charlot in Paris from 21 April, Home keeping home shaking at L'ahah in Paris from 30 June to 9 July, and Paréidolie in Marseille on 27–28 August. A separate online project of the same period, Là où habite ma maison, ran on the Jeu de Paume's virtual space from 1 March to 31 August 2021.

Nice, 2025, and after

The 2025 solo is the show that made the VR piece the organising principle of a room rather than a station within one. All insomniacs please raise your right hand ran at Galerie Eva Vautier, 2 rue Vernier, Nice, from 7 June to 27 September 2025, opening at six on the evening of Friday 6 June; the gallery records it as its first solo exhibition with the artist. I Will Sleep When I'm Dead sat at the centre. Around it the gallery's record lists Control, made of a thread of light; Disco Ball, a faceted volume derived from the ether molecule; and Bird, a small glass sculpture of an anatomical form — along with an alarm clock shaking out an excerpt of a Trump speech and a suspended puppet being insulted, a scene the gallery relates to violence against women. The insomnia in the title is the insomnia of the maze: a brain that will not switch off.

The rest of the recent chronology is dense: Tout semblait pourtant si calme at the Citadelle de Villefranche-sur-Mer, Hopes&Fears at the Bonisson Art Center in Rognes and Balance of chaos at Stella Rouskova in Genoa, all 2023; Occasions perdues at the MRAC Occitanie in Sérignan and Se está mejor en casa que en ningún sitio at the Pozo Santa Bárbara in Turón, Spain, both 2024; and Ordinary Madness at La Patinoire Royale Bach in Brussels in 2025. Her work is held by the Centre Pompidou, the FNAC, several FRACs, the MRAC Sérignan, MUDAC Lausanne, the Bass Museum in Miami, Kunsthalle Detroit, the Musée du verre de Carmaux and the Fundació Vila Casas in Barcelona.

Three 2026 entries stand on the record as this file is written. Anniversarium Stress — the group exhibition marking the twentieth anniversary of the MABA in Nogent-sur-Marne, 2006 to 2026 — listed her among eleven names and ran from 23 April to 19 July 2026, after a vernissage on 22 April. Croire et guérir. Et délivrez-nous du mal, at the Musée d'art et d'histoire Paul Éluard in Saint-Denis, opened on 27 May and runs to 15 November 2026; the published list of eleven contemporary artists includes her, though the museum's own exhibition page names only two of them. Life is a dance!, curated by Hélène Audiffren at the Domaine de Roueïre in Quarante, opened 4 July 2026 and runs to 15 May 2027: it spans twenty-five years of her production, adds work made during a territorial residency in the Sud-Hérault, and includes I Will Sleep When I'm Dead.

How a work like this is actually acquired

The Pompidou purchase is the useful part of the story for anyone trying to understand what changed between a work on a Luxembourg wall in 2016 and a headset on a plinth now. Four mechanics, all documented by museum conservation programmes rather than by the market:

Edition

VR is editioned exactly like a photograph or a video. The Pompidou record for I Will Sleep When I'm Dead reads "Ed : 1/5 + 2 AP" — five numbered copies and two artist's proofs. What the buyer owns is a numbered instance of a piece of software with a licence and a set of installation conditions, not a unique object.

What is delivered

Not the headset. Matters in Media Art, the guidance the New Art Trust has published with MoMA, SFMOMA and Tate since 2005 — first on acquisitions, then on loans, and extended since — tells a curator or a collector to establish before purchase where the original master lives, in what format, who holds it and who owns the copyright; to obtain an artist's statement and a non-technical description of what the viewer experiences; to separate essential display conditions from merely desirable ones; and to forecast the cost of ownership before, not after, the invoice.

Hardware dependency

The commercial headset is a consumable with a short life. Meta announced the deprecation of the original Quest in January 2023; its last operating-system release, v50, shipped in February 2023; new store applications were barred from supporting it from May 2024; security updates ended in August 2024; and developers lost the ability to support it in store updates on 31 January 2025. A work authored for a specific headset can therefore be orphaned by its platform in well under six years, which is a fraction of the horizon on which museums plan.

Migration, emulation, documentation

Tate's time-based media conservation department defines its remit as works that depend on technology and have duration as a dimension, and its stated practice is to make display copies, plan for obsolescence work by work, and consult the artist — because the choice of a specific technology places a work at a point in history and carries meaning. The Guggenheim's Conserving Computer-Based Art initiative goes further into software: identity reports describing what a work is and how it should behave, iteration reports recording each installation, artist interviews, screen recordings of the work running, and a choice between emulating the original machine at its original processing speed and the more invasive option of altering the work — adjusting the frame rate of an animation to compensate for contemporary processors, for instance — with conservators, computer scientists and engineers reading the artist's source code together.

None of that infrastructure existed at 22, rue Louvigny, and none of it needed to. A small gallery sells prints; the obligations end at the frame. The distance between WPG.03 and AM 2025-517 is the distance between a business that could close without anyone having to migrate a file and an institution that has taken on a maintenance duty measured in decades. What happens to the record when the first kind of place disappears is the subject of a separate file, When a gallery closes; the founding history of this one is in The Record.

The dossier for this artist, with her Wild Project Gallery entry and the rest of the index, is at Jeanne Susplugas, alongside the other ten names on the roster. This page is an open file: the Disorder checklist and installation views of the Luxembourg show are both outstanding, and documented additions are welcome through the contact form.