Marien Schouten (b. NL, 1956, lives in Amsterdam) is a well-known figure in Tilburg. De Pont Museum houses his most iconic work: Green Room / Snake (2001–2002), a green ceramic room. Like Dan Graham's pavilions of glass and steel, this room - and other rooms Schouten has made - is designed for the viewer to walk into. Because sculpture and architecture are blurred, this art practice is referred to as architectural sculpture.
Green Room / Snake was the starting point for the work he created for Lustwarande in 2016, Green Room/Vault, a monumental, vertical sheet of green oceanic glass with one of Schouten’s typical green ceramic sculptures on a pedestal in front of it. This work, which suggests a space, is now on permanent view in the sculpture garden of the Kröller–Müller Museum.

Schouten started out as a painter. In his painting, he likes to refer to classical-modern artists and uses the visual language of famous predecessors such as Piet Mondrian. Since 2000, he has made work that seems less and less like painting and increasingly like sculpture and installation, arising from his interest in three-dimensionality and architecture. For example, he has hung entire structures on paintings – crosses, iron fittings and wooden benches – so that their two-dimensional character is lost.

For STATIONS, Schouten made an architectural sculpture of plywood, with a matte-grey painted exterior and an unpainted interior, which shows the strong veins in the plywood. Two spaces, the size of an average living room, were slightly tilted and connected by a passage. In the backroom, the visitor encountered a bookcase, chairs and a bed, all made of the same plywood.

Nocturnal Reading was a development of A Reader's Bedroom (2019), a wooden space containing furniture-like objects attached to the walls and floor. Schouten’s furniture-like objects are not considered part of an interior. They are miniature translations of the architecture.

Nocturnal Reading was not only a formal architectural sculpture but also an expression of the state of insomnia and at the same time a way of countering that condition, which Schouten often suffers from himself, when he spends the night hours reading.

During STATIONS there were a number of nightly reading sessions in Nocturnal Reading. To this end, Schouten invited a number of individual guests to read a text of their choice during a nightly hour. The texts read aloud, Nocturnal Readings, thus manifested themselves as voices in a dream. Nocturnal Readings took place without an audience but were recorded and can be followed Facebook and Instagram and in this archive.

Nocturnal Reading was made possible with additional support from the Mondriaan Fund.