About

Dirk Jan Jager is a performance artist working in a variety of media. He began his career as a painter, and in his performance work he still approaches painting from unusual perspectives. In many of his performances the living surface of the body is defined as a site of intervention. It becomes a blank canvas, yet its surface does not exactly receive, or host, images. Jager alludes to motifs from painting or mythical figures to stage the body, allowing the familiar image to act as a second skin, which in the course of the performance is gradually peeled off, to reveal an anonymous, generic body. A central element in his work is the gesture of erasing identities, and images that support them. Another aspect of his work is the interest in rituals and rites of passage, and transitional states that give birth to a new person, within a performative situation which involves the covering and peeling off the full surface of the body with different materials.