Crisis Karaoke pt1 and pt2 

2015, 2020

Crisis Karaoke 1 (2015)

First shown at Berlin’s 3AM event (Flutgraben), Crisis Karaoke 1 transformed video documentation of a therapy session in which Jeremy Wade experienced a panic attack over financial precarity. Subtitles looped every gasp, hesitation, and despairing phrase until they erupted into El Perro Del Mar’s Party. The audience was invited to sing along, converting private collapse into a collective refrain.
by Jeremy Wade and Karol Tyminski

Crisis Karaoke 2 (2020)

Created during the COVID-19 lockdown, Crisis Karaoke 2 extended the format into direct address. A trigger warning in Wade’s own voice framed therapy footage, panic, and collapse as a participatory sing-along, insisting that “feeling bad is structural.” From awkward hesitation to recognition, audiences found solidarity across their precarious conditions.
by Jeremy Wade, Darcey Bennett and Zander Porter

As Annelies Van Assche writes, Crisis Karaoke “lays bare the mental precarity of the entrepreneurial self, worn out pure and simple, while transforming collapse into a public score”. Together, the two works build what Berlant and Warner describe as ‘public feelings’: intimate symptoms of anxiety and despair recoded as collective, political conditions. By weaponizing vulnerability as song, the pieces transform structural exhaustion into an affective commons of critique, humor, and solidarity.