The Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness and MAQUIS
Performances by Jeremiah Day

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw invites you to the performances "The Frank Church – River of No Return Wilderness" and "MAQUIS" and the accompanying exhibition.

In his artistic practice, visual artist and performer Jeremiah Day examines the tensions and dependencies between mechanisms of individual and collective memory. The artist draws on personal recollections, microhistories and local mythologies, as well as working through community experiences in the perspective of political processes and historical events. During his dynamic performances, which he interweaves with other media (particularly photography and video), Day engages the entire apparatus of forms for embodiment and movement, which put up resistance to the material: he crawls, and runs and falls, all while weaving stories and exchanging remarks and anecdotes with the audience.

During his week-long residence in Warsaw, Day will execute two performative works. On Tuesday, 4 October, will be the performance and the next act of the accompanying project The Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness. Part ode and part epitaph, half investigation and half anti-monument, it commemorates the figure of the legendary Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s chaired the committee on illegal activities by the CIA and was the first politician in US history to provide a glimpse into the structure of American counterintelligence. Church’s name has figured recently in public debate as an historic counterpoint for the activity of the American whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The title of the work comes from the name of a nature reserve in Idaho, the largest area in the lower 48 states of nature uncontaminated by human activity, named in honour of Senator Church, who warned against crossing a bridge of no return, toward mass surveillance, violation of civil liberties, and the tyranny of power. The performance will be accompanied by Dutch guitarist Bart de Kroon, and the installation Frank Church–River of No Return Wilderness can be viewed until 9 October in the exhibition space of the Museum of Modern Art at ul. Pańska 3, Warsaw.

On Thursday, 6 October, Day will perform the work Maquis, which takes the form of a town-hall meeting, directly engaging the audience in an open discussion. The meeting will be led by Jeremiah Day together with Krytyka Polityczna commentator Jakub Dymek and philosopher Mateusz Werner. In response to the ongoing debate on the crisis of identity and European integration, the point of departure for our deliberations will a performative presentation of Day’s slides about the history of federalism and the resistance movement in Europe, combining elements of the thought of Hannah Arendt and the tradition of existentialism.