Another Eye Constance DeJong: It’s Always Night, performance

Constance DeJong’s writing and art is driven by a tireless process of collecting elements of linguistic and visual expression: within her performative work, she allows language and image to merge and flow into one another. For the last forty years, DeJong has worked on narrative form in the context of contemporary art and avant-garde music. Considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media,” DeJong shapes her intricate narrative form through performances, audio installations, print texts, electronic objects, and video works. This porousness already shaped her influential, long-neglected 1977 novel Modern Love, in which elements from science fiction, autofiction, and detective stories merge across disciplinary boundaries. 

Her newly developed performance It’s Always Night (2023–24) juxtaposes a live reading of selected texts with a personal collection of images. Multimediality and parallelism among film and performance permit relationships to emerge between visual and associative mental images. In these liminal spaces and juxtapositions, narrative connections and affinities arise, but also discontinuities and discrepancies.

Constance DeJong (b. 1950, Cleveland, OH, USA) lives and works in New York. In addition to her award-winning novel Modern Love (1977), she has worked in long-term collaborations with Philip Glass and Tony Oursler, with whom she also developed the performance series Relatives (1989). Constance DeJong’s performances have been presented internationally, including at The Kitchen, New York; Artists Space, New York; and the Renaissance Society, Chicago.

It’s Always Night is a collaboration between Theater Neumarkt, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Kunstverein München, IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

Presented as part of the program series Another Eye of the Kuntverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf and Circulating Copies of IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute, DeJong’s performance keys into continuous investigations into media-specific characteristics of film and video, their presentation formats, as well as their potentials for transformation. Connecting reading and screening, the performance addresses the multifaceted relationships between moving and still images and written narratives in an expanded form. IMAI – Inter Media Art Institute is also presenting the collaborative video work In Shadow City (1988) by Constance DeJong and Ken Feingold and shares the online publication Nightwriters.