What Is Power?

About

Flat Time House is pleased to partner with Arcade to present What Is Power? a new exhibition by Berlin based American artist Jeremiah Day. Using photography, performance, text and installation, Day investigates art’s capacity for the civic and re-examines political conflicts and resistances. His personal narrative style unfolds subjective traces to ground political thinking in tender experience.

For What Is Power? Jeremiah Day mobilizes multiple voices engaged in civic activism. The title of the exhibition derives from an essay by Day’s friend and mentor Fred Dewey (1957-2021) a democracy activist, writer, artist and publisher. He organised public readings, which he called ‘working groups’, of Hannah Arendt’s writings on freedom and thinking. Dewey wanted readers to envision a different kind of politics, where people can claim their own power. The exhibition includes a new contribution from the Fred Rogers Dewey Legacy Project, a documentation of readings of What Is Power? one of Dewey’s most penetrating texts, filmed by Dana Berman Duff. This project extends Dewey’s belief that in the potential of gathering plural voices around a common object.

Day has chosen to situate Fred Dewey’s thinking in dialogue with the long-term and ongoing project The Lowndes County Idea, which includes photography, video documentation, performance and writing. The project explores the Lowndes County Freedom Organisation (LCFO), a pioneering independent African-American political effort based in rural Alabama, that inspired the Black Panther Party. Since 2008, Jeremiah Day has returned again and again to Alabama, seeking how exemplification, landscape and the civic role of art intersect in the commemoration of the LCFO. Whilst underlying issues of race and freedom continue to resonate, Day suggests that there is still more to discover and preserve from the laboratory for radical democracy at Lowndes, whilst presenting the issues of responsibility involved with discussing and depicting such a history.

Jeremiah Day’s attraction to affirmative political examples emerged directly from his dialogue and work with Fred Dewey. A publication included in the exhibition presents a discussion that took place in Lowndes County between Jeremiah Day and Fred Dewey alongside conversations with scholar of civil rights and the Black Power movement Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and civil rights activist and military veteran JoAnne Bland.

To expand on this conversation Day has invited JoAnne Bland, who grew up and lives in Selma, Alabama to contribute a special online talk for the exhibition. Bland became active in the civil rights movement when she was eight years old – part of the famed ‘Children’s Crusade’, and marched across the Selma bridge with Martin Luther King, Jr.  Bland later came to realise the political meaning of memory and went on to co-found the National Voting Rights Museum to preserve the legacy and principles of ‘the struggle’. Her talks deal with the history of the Civil Rights Movement and segregation and the struggle to achieve Voting Rights.

JoAnne Bland’s contribution will be freely available to join online at 7pm Tuesday 27th June.