Phonograms
Jeremy Deller
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Jeremy Deller opens his Phonogram by admitting to a certain dislike of audio guides, before taking listeners on a journey from the Cerruti library to the Norfolk coast. A village discovered in the Blaeus’ seventeenth-century atlas becomes the starting point for a series of encounters and digressions: lands swallowed by the sea, a solar eclipse, amusement arcades and seaside theatres, sacred music and pop riffs.
Deller weaves together personal anecdotes, field recordings and musical interludes, eventually returning to Cerruti through the sound of machinery in an industrial bookbinding factory. The very sound that helped make the Collection possible becomes the material for a new composition.
Listen to Jeremy Deller's Phonogram
Jeremy Deller lives and works in London. He studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute and the University of Sussex. In 2004, he won the Turner Prize, and in 2013 he represented Great Britain at the 55th Venice Biennale.
Since the early 1990s, he has created works and projects exploring popular culture, social and political history, music and forms of collective participation, often outside conventional exhibition spaces. His projects include Acid Brass (1997), which reinterprets acid house anthems through a brass band; The Battle of Orgreave (2001), a re-enactment of the 1984 confrontation between miners and police; and Sacrilege (2012), an inflatable Stonehenge that visitors can bounce on. In 2025, he created The Triumph of Art to mark the National Gallery’s bicentenary.
In his films, music becomes a lens through which to explore society: from the devotion of fans in Our Hobby Is Depeche Mode (2006), made with Nick Abrahams, to British history as seen through rave culture in Everybody in the Place (2018).