Jeremiah Day (1974, USA), an Amsterdam and Berlin-based artist, received an art degree from the University of California, Los Angeles (US, 1997), and subsequently completed the residency program at the Rijksakademie (2003-2004). In 2009 he worked in residency in Istanbul at Platform Garanti, and then in 2015 at the Villa Romana in Florence. Movements are important in Jeremiah Day's practice, working regularly with the pioneer of postmodern dance, Simone Forti. His work establishes a montage narrative form, where political and personal realities intertwine through different techniques, including photography, video and movement. Jeremiah Day is interested in subjects which have a strong impact on our political or democratic systems and on the failures of the western democracies and which appear to have been, sometimes voluntary, forgotten in history. His performances are based on research through philosophical and political texts, as well as on historical archives.  

Accompanied by the improvisations of musician Bart de Kroon, the performances remain by their nature open and contingent, with their sense found in being re-composed each time anew. The sites, questions, stories and movements that are mobilised through the works unfold as a live and concrete experience with the public, and improvisation becomes a means to turn the public into the stakeholders of a shared speculation.  

 

In 2017, Jeremiah Day earned an artistic doctorate from the Free University of Amsterdam (VU), submitting a thesis entitled 'A kind of imagination that has nothing to do with fiction: Art in Public Life'. With Allan Kaprow and Hannah Arendt as examples and guides, the research project developed through concrete artistic and discursive projects in the public realm: speculative insights leading to practical experiments that in turn form the basis of a new way of thinking. 

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This text was co-written by Gavriella Abekassis and Jeremiah Day especially for this project.