Jeremy Shaw Dances With the Divine
Jeremy Shaw, a Berlin-based Canadian artist born in 1977, creates video installations and sculptural works exploring transcendence, spirituality, and altered states of consciousness. His major work “Phase Shifting Index” (2020), a seven-channel video installation currently displayed at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, depicts seven distinct dance troupes from different historical and cultural contexts moving in separate gallery spaces before converging into a unified kinetic composition that ultimately dissolves into pixelated abstraction. The 35-minute immersive piece interrogates the relationship between empirical neuroscience and subjective spiritual experience, questioning whether rational explanation validates or diminishes mystical phenomena. Shaw’s artistic practice, rooted in his Catholic upbringing and queer identity, positions bodies and movement as sites of transcendence, ritual, and communal bonding. His work has been exhibited at Centre Pompidou, MoMA PS1, and the Venice Biennale, establishing him as a significant figure in contemporary video art and performance-based installation.
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