Mike Kelley. Day Is Done. Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions | Art City 2026 Special Project

From 5 to 7 February 2026, on the occasion of Art City 2026, the spaces of the former Faculty of Engineering host Day Is Done by Mike Kelley.

The works of Mike Kelley investigate the relationships between power, psyche, and institutions. In the continuous interplay between mass culture and personal experience, his analysis extends to educational systems and their capacity to shape individuals. According to the artist, schools represent a repressive structure that extends the domain of authority. Having strayed from their original aims, educational institutions seem more concerned with controlling students’ bodies than with transmitting knowledge. The analysis of scholastic constraints becomes for Kelley an opportunity to reflect on American cultural identity and its social dynamics.

Day Is Done is a collection of 31 musical short films inspired by extracurricular activities—those events and programs that take place outside regular class hours.

Using an almost anthropological method, Kelley consulted school yearbooks and local newspapers to gather hundreds of photographs of plays, concerts, liturgies, costume parties, assemblies, and talent shows. After cataloguing them, he attempted to construct more or less linear narratives by mixing the images together.

These sequences of photographs became the starting point for the realization of the short films, which replicate their scenarios. The videos combine into a carnival resembling a chaotic Broadway production: within the space of a typical gymnasium, dancers, metalheads, devils, horses, and hooligans break the monotony of the school timetable and attempt to escape duty.

By representing figures and symbols of adolescent folklore, the artist brings to light the unconscious of educational activities. In the allegorical context of the school, once “the day is done,” the time of obedience is also suspended. Extracurricular activities therefore offer a space of expression for all the impulses, desires, and frustrations that educational systems seek to suppress.

These “accepted rituals of deviance” trace the psychic memory of what is repressed and temporarily interrupt the production of control in everyday life. Against the rote learning of an abstract education that constrains bodily experience, the figures summoned by Kelley reclaim their reality, made up of traumas, needs, imbalances, and appetites. Kelley’s interest in normative structures has also extended to modernist architecture and the prescriptive uses of space.

In resonance with this theme, Day Is Done is presented on the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2026 in the spaces of the former Faculty of Engineering, an example of Bolognese Rationalism.