The Sleepers in Venice exhibition was organised by Stephanie Seungmin Kim and eight young Korean artists, with the Turner Prize artist Mark Wallinger as a guest artist, during the 2015 Venice Biennale. The exhibition was prompted by SSK’s idea of making a connection between what she feels when she visits the Venice Biennale as a curator and human beings who are helpless when confronted with the conflation of desire and intellect. She also linked her ideas with those of the German writer Thomas Mann presented in his novella Der tod in Venerdig [Death in Venice]: The physical locus of the artists’ fantasy, the Venice Biennale, seems attractive on the face of it, but artists have reported feeling nauseous and impatient when confronted by this overwhelming experience of desire and intellect. In the process, the curator thought of Mark Wallinger’s work Sleeper, in which he wanted to express the anguish of artists who were bound to monolithic arts institutions such as art museums.
Stephanie Seungmin Kim observed that this work connected with her plans for the Sleepers in Venice project and contacted him directly; this led to Wallinger participating in the exhibition as an invited artist and advisor. The term ‘sleeper’, the main subject of the exhibition, is a reference to the term for a spy who lies low, or ‘sleeps’, before a period of espionage activity. In this context, artists and people involved in the cultural industries with the potential to grow inside and outside Korea can be thought of as ‘sleepers’. The Sleepers in Venice exhibition was successful, attracting the media's attention from many countries; over 5000 people visited the exhibition.
It took three years for Stephanie Seungmin Kim to produce a film of the exhibition. The fundraising allowed her to commission eight musicians to create a OST album. Complete with Steve M.Choe’s direction and editing for the film, Sleepers in Venice, the documentary saw the light in 2018.