Visualisation only — not installation documentation.
Monumental images of sleeping men will appear across the digital screens of Times Square this week, as artist-filmmaker Grzegorz Stefanski brings his ongoing project sleepers into one of New York’s most public and image-saturated spaces.
From 25th–27th September 2026, the Polish, London-based artist’s barely moving monochrome bodies will appear on the screens of 5 Times Square as part of GIANT SIGNALS: NEW YORK, presented by DISIVA during Armory Week.
The wider project brings together 43 international artistic practices, including 30 selected by an international curatorial committee, and approaches Times Square’s huge digital screens as an exhibition space in their own right. Rather than recreating the gallery outdoors, GIANT SIGNALS looks at what happens when art has to compete with architecture, advertising, technology and the constant circulation of people and images.
For Stefa?ski, that environment creates a particularly sharp contrast.
sleepers explores contemporary masculinity through vulnerability, intimacy and the unconscious body. Participants are recorded overnight in their own bedrooms using infrared cameras, each session captured as a single uninterrupted take.
While asleep, they temporarily lose control over the gestures and self-presentation through which public identities are normally constructed. The next morning, Stefanski photographs the participants again using black-and-white analogue photography, reintroducing pose, composition and an awareness of being seen.
“I want to reclaim vulnerability as part of what it means to be masculine today,”
Stefanski says.
“Not as something men should hide, but something they might openly embrace.”
The work also depends on an unusual degree of trust. Stefanski enters each participant’s bedroom to install the camera and then leaves, returning the following morning. Being filmed asleep means surrendering control of your image at precisely the moment when you are unable to perform for the camera.
The project developed further during Stefanski’s 2026 residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. Previously made with friends, in New York he began working with people he didn’t already know, finding participants through Open Studios and chance encounters and extending the project’s ideas of trust and observation into unfamiliar relationships.
And then there is Times Square itself.
Surrounded by advertising, faces, colour and constant movement, the scale of sleepers turns something intensely private into public spectacle while refusing most of the things that spectacle usually requires. There is no performance, sales pitch or attempt to grab attention — just an unconscious body doing almost nothing.
As Paul Milican writes in the accompanying text, the result creates a tension between intimacy and distance: close enough to watch a stranger sleeping, but separated from him by a vast digital screen and one of the busiest public spaces in the world.
For a few moments at least, the city that never sleeps gets to watch somebody who does.
Grzegorz Stefanski’s sleepers is part of GIANT SIGNALS: NEW YORK, presented by DISIVA at 5 Times Square, New York, 25th–27th September 2026. The programme begins daily at 6.30PM local time.
About the artist
Grzegorz Stefanski is a Polish artist-filmmaker based in London. Working primarily with moving image, photography, and installation, his practice explores embodiment, intimacy, and contemporary masculinity through gesture, repetition, and the relationship between vulnerability and control.
He holds an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art and an MA in Philosophy from Jagiellonian University. His work has been exhibited and screened internationally, including the Louvre Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Manifesta 11. Recent residencies include Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS), Tokyo (2023), and the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York (2026). grzegorzstefanski.com
