The Many Lives of Erik Kessels, on view at Camera – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in Torino, offers the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to the photographic work of the Dutch artist, art director and publisher Erik Kessels. Over the 20 years of his career, Kessels has come to the fore as a main and unquestionable reference in the field of so-called “found photography”.
Instead of shooting new images, for most of his projects he brings together pre-existent photographs and reuses them as tiles to form his own mosaic. He is a photographer without a camera or even a lens: in his practice, photography is a ready-made element to be sampled and re-contextualised. The result is a sort of eco-system of images, through which nothing is added to the enormous quantity of imagery which now crowds out the world and grows exponentially day by day, but which on the contrary merely recoups and recycles that which is already there.
On display throughout the entire Camera exhibition spaces, The Many Lives of Erik Kessels traces the entire photographic career of the Dutch artist through a detailed exhibition itinerary featuring several hundred of images. In total, there are twenty-seven series on show, as well as a great number of books and magazines published by the now famous publishing house founded by Kessels himself (KesselsKramer Publishing) as well as by other publishers. Along a non-linear and non-chronological itinerary, we come across monumental works, more intimate and private series, authentic icons of the whole universe of ‘found photography’, not to mention more recent and even previously unseen work.
Among the works on show, to give but a few examples, 24hrs of Photos literally invades the exhibition space with a mountain made up of prints of all the images, hundreds of thousands of them, uploaded onto the Internet in a single day. My Feet, a majestic installation made up exclusively of images of the feet of those behind the camera, immediately introduces the concepts of repetition and archiving.
Valery, a woman who throughout her life had her photograph taken underwater; Oolong, the equilibrist rabbit, and a dog too black to appear correctly in photographs are just some of the protagonists of In Almost Every Picture, a cycle of 14 projects (so far) each revolving around an obsessively repetitive figure. My Sister is a video with a soundtrack by the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto taken from a home-movie dedicated entirely to a table-tennis match between the artist and his sister, who tragically died in a road accident at the age of just nine. Album Beauty is a whole room dedicated to the phenomenon of family albums: among Kessels’s privileged subjects, democratically reappraising amateur photographers and turning the spotlights of artistic research onto them.
The Many Lives of Erik Kessels thus in turn constitutes a great act of accumulation. First of all in terms of display: featuring framed and unframed images, hanging from walls and laid on the ground, using lightboxes, cubes, wallpaper, portrait frames and projections, it first of all provides a synthesis and a de-construction of every possible photo show. And of photographs, for of course there are no genres, artists, epochs or geographies excluded from Kessels omnivorous research. Right down to the cast-offs: instead of being a blight to be carefully avoided, here on the contrary the error becomes an attractive and meaningful element. That’s what makes a photograph special; a mark of its vitality. Kessels rummages through the photographers’ waste, restoring it to the collective gaze from an entirely renewed stance. It is also from here that the often ferocious and desecrating irony of his work stems. Laughter has a liberating and purifying function. It allows Kessels to dig down deep, plummeting every form of hypocrisy and expressing a deep affection both for the involuntary protagonists of his photographic pantheon and for photography itself.
The many lives of Erik Kessels
CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia
1 June – 30 July 2017
Via della Rosine 18
10123 Torino
Italy
