The Prince Is Asleep Too
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Dates2026 - Ongoing
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Author
What happens when we outgrow fairy tales but continue to desire their promises? The Prince Is Asleep Too explores how inherited fantasies shape our desires, our sense of possibility, and the lives we imagine for ourselves.
The Prince Is Asleep Too
What happens when we outgrow the fairy tale but continue to desire its ending?
Cinderella waits to be transformed. Snow White keeps house for seven men. Sleeping Beauty sleeps until someone arrives. The Little Mermaid gives up her voice. Their stories promise that patience, beauty and sacrifice will eventually be rewarded; that a life suspended in waiting will find its purpose in being chosen.
We know better than to take these stories literally. Yet their promises persist in less recognisable forms: in the desire to become desirable, in the hope that love will resolve something fundamental about us, in the fantasy that our lives might begin once we have become someone else. The prince changes shape. He becomes a message, a proposal, an imagined reunion, the person who might finally recognise us.
I am interested in the uneasy relationship between knowing and wanting. We can recognise the absurdity of a fantasy and still be unable to relinquish it. We can question the idea that happiness depends on being chosen and still imagine the moment someone chooses us. Perhaps these desires are not simply inherited scripts to be rejected. They may also offer ways of imagining possibilities beyond the present, of making disappointment bearable, of giving uncertainty a shape.
Where does the fantasy end and our own desire begin? How much of what we want belongs to us, and how much have we learnt to want? What happens when the promised ending never arrives, or arrives and fails to deliver the life we imagined?
The Prince Is Asleep Too explores the afterlife of the fairy tale: the fantasies we continue to inhabit, even as we become aware of their contradictions. The happily-ever-after remains suspended, less a destination than a promise we cannot quite stop wanting.
