You’re supposed to have a legible dream. One that fits neatly into a bio, a pitch deck, a portfolio tab.

Brand yourself. Rebrand when it stops working. Be authentic, but niche. Pick a style. Optimize it. Sell it. Sell it again. Somewhere in the background, the image stays fixed: a clean studio, a walkable life, work that travels easily and pays its way.

A future that looks spectacular from the outside. This is the dream creatives are told to want.

The trouble is, living inside that dream is exhausting. Not because artists lack ambition, but because ambition has been re-scripted as constant visibility. Creative work is no longer allowed to exist quietly, experimentally, or in fragments. It must always be preparing itself for an audience. Over time, the pressure shows up not just in output, but in the body; in tight shoulders, shortened attention, a sense that the present moment is merely a bridge to something else.

The Anti-Dream Project began from that fatigue. From a growing discomfort with how often creative conversations circled around the same metrics: reach, consistency, growth, the next opportunity that might finally justify the effort. I wanted to know what happens when you stop asking artists about their dreams and instead pay attention to what their work looks like when it isn’t organized around an imagined future at all.

Photo courtesy of @navyachandna03

Dismantling the dream

Dreaming has long been central to artistic life. Imagining a future can be orienting. It can offer direction, especially in environments where resources are scarce or access is uneven. But something has shifted. Today, dreaming is no longer just about possibility. It’s about performance. The dream must be visible, monetizable, continuously updated. You have to maintain a trajectory.

Psychologically, this creates a strange split. The body remains in the present—tired, distracted, overextended—while the mind is constantly projected forward. Work becomes a placeholder for a better version of itself. The studio becomes provisional. Rest feels undeserved unless it can be justified as “recharging.” When value is measured by future payoff, staying with the present starts to feel like failure.

Anti-dreaming, as I’m using it here, isn’t about giving up. It’s about refusing this particular configuration of time. It’s a refusal to let the market dictate not just what work looks like, but when it is allowed to matter.

Sameera’s studio

Photo courtesy of @navyachandna03

Sameera’s studio feels mid-thought. Walls hold marks without claiming them. Canvases lean against each other, stretched and then released, their edges softened by repeated handling. Tools sit where they were last put down, without ceremony. She tells me the space feels like a reflection of her current state. I believe her, not because it sounds poetic, but because nothing here is pretending to be complete. The room carries a sense of suspension, a practice of living inside time rather than progressing through it.

More recently, she has been working on pieces shaped by Partition. The work doesn’t announce itself. It gathers slowly, through surfaces that have been returned to, left alone, re-entered. Some pieces feel paused. Others feel dense with years. Standing with them, I become aware of how history moves here, for her. Memories of memories translated into visuals on canvas, on metal, on surfaces I feel scared to touch and ruin.

“The reality of being an artist versus being a person who has to afford being an artist are two very different things.”

Photo courtesy of @navyachandna03

She tells me about holding three jobs at once. About entire years spent sustaining rather than making. Space becomes another recurring question. She gestures around the studio as she speaks. “Making requires space. And that again comes down to the economics of it. Can you afford the space? Can you afford to lease a space, rent a studio?” The unfinishedness of the room begins to feel deliberate. The walls, the floor, the absence of resolution, all of it mirrors a practice negotiating how much room it’s allowed to take up.

I notice how she hesitates before touching certain materials. How some pieces are returned to, again and again, while others remain untouched. This is attunement. The body decides what it can hold that day. She tells me towards the end, “Some works demand that you move towards them and away from them, physically, but also cognitively. They take on a movement of their own.” Her process unfolds through movement. Toward the canvas. Away from it. Around it. “Even the act of stretching your canvases… the unstretching of it… and then looking at it.” She talks about leaving work alone for months, sometimes years. We talk about how the timeline stretches. The work doesn’t disappear during that gap. It waits.

Because we’re friends, I notice the moments that don’t make it into formal interviews. The hesitation before naming a direction. The ease with uncertainty. The lack of urgency to resolve meaning. Watching her work shifts how I think about anti-dreaming, about a willingness to stay with something without translating it into output or outcome.

Photo courtesy of @navyachandna03

When I leave the studio, I realize how little of this experience would survive reduction into a single image or caption. The work lives in accumulation — in the years it absorbs, the pauses it insists on, the physical negotiation between body, space, and material. In a culture trained to reward articulation and arrival, this practice remains open. It continues, quietly, on its own time. I give myself a moment to admire before analysing.

Mahi’s Room

Photo courtesy of @navyachandna03

Mahi’s practice announces itself through proximity. You notice it first in how close the work stays to the body. Skin as surface. Breath as timing. Hands moving with a steadiness that comes from repetition rather than instruction. There is no inherited studio language here, no academic residue to push against. What exists instead is a process built slowly, through trial, error, and the willingness to stay with consequences.

Mahi makes objects people want to buy. And when that starts happening—when the work becomes predictable enough to reproduce, to price, to expect—she leaves the medium behind.

Mahi doesn’t even really call herself an artist. The word doesn’t seem to land. It implies continuity, intention, and a willingness to stay. What she does instead is insist on making things.

Metal jewelry. Clay forms. Masks. Nail art that disappears within weeks.

Photo courtesy of @navyachandna03

It’s tempting to read this as inconsistency, or even avoidance. But watching her closely, it feels closer to saturation. Once the material stops resisting her, once it starts producing predictable outcomes, the exchange collapses. The curiosity drains. She doesn’t linger long enough to turn mastery into identity.

She can be careless about craft in ways that frustrate people. She abandons pieces midway. She misses deadlines. She treats commissions with a distance that feels almost rude. There’s something psychologically revealing here. Her making doesn’t organize itself around improvement or accumulation. There’s no fantasy of arrival. No desire to extract longevity from a medium once it’s understood. When the work becomes stable enough to sell, it stops being a site of inquiry.

Being close to this way of working unsettles my own assumptions. We’re taught that discipline looks like persistence, that seriousness requires commitment to a single trajectory. What I witness here is a practice that refuses that script. It treats making as temporary habitation. A place you enter fully, learn quickly, and then leave once the questions run out.

To watch her is to watch the death of the 'career.' She is adamant about starting again, and again, and again.

“Look at it like this: once I learn a medium, and the questions run out, my curiosity turns to something different. It's not that I consume and discard. I keep it with me forever. But the drive to learn more and more, to have mediums obey me, is far too shiny for me to ignore.”

In my eyes, there’s loss here: unfinished objects, missed opportunities, moments that could have been sustained. In hers, this is a gain, a kind of freedom that’s rarely acknowledged, Mahi's making leaves very little behind. What does remain is the memory of attention — brief, exacting, and unsentimental (and trinkets on her desk). In a culture obsessed with continuity and scale, this kind of disappearance feels almost radical.

What happens if you stop dreaming?

Photo courtesy of @navyachandna03

These two practices look nothing alike. One moves in cycles of return; the other moves through constant departure. One lingers with work across years; the other releases it once the curiosity thins. Yet both unsettle the same assumption: that creative work must build toward something measurable. Not every practice needs to scale. Not every artist is interested in becoming better in a linear way. For some, the act of making is complete in itself. When the inquiry shifts, so does the medium.

This matters beyond individual studios. We’re living through widespread creative burnout, intensified by platform economies that collapse making, marketing, and selfhood into a single performance.

The rise of anti-hustle discourse, growing anxiety around automation and AI, and increasing precarity across creative fields have all exposed the fragility of the dream we’re asked to invest in.

When visibility becomes the primary measure of value, exhaustion becomes structural. Anti-dreaming is meant to redirect attention. Away from imagined futures and toward what’s actually happening: the body in the room, the material at hand, the conditions that make work possible or impossible today.

Of course, visibility can also be survival. For artists historically excluded from institutions, dreaming publicly can open doors that were otherwise closed.

The problem isn’t dreaming itself, it’s how narrowly it’s defined. When only one kind of future is valued—marketable, scalable, coherent—other ways of working are quietly dismissed. The slow, the cyclical, the unresolved are treated as failures rather than choices.

When the dream collapses, what remains isn’t nothing. There is still work. Still repetition. Still frustration, care, and occasional joy. The Anti-Dream Project is an attempt to record artists choosing to stay with reality. To negotiate with it, adapt to it, and sometimes refuse it—without escaping into fantasy.

You stop dreaming for a moment, you look around at your hands, at the people, at the faces. You realise that creative work is not a vehicle but a location. It does not need to take you somewhere else, certainly not to an idealistic dreamscape. It is simply the room where you already are.

Banner photo courtesy of @navyachandna03

Eva Gill is a multidisciplinary writer and psychology student focused on the lived, often messy realities of creative and cultural work. She has contributed to independent art and cultural platforms and engaged closely with contemporary art ecosystems.

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Today, dreaming is no longer just about possibility. It’s about performance. The dream must be visible, monetizable, continuously updated.

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