Interview: Erik Kessels
“My Exhibition Is about Light and Irony” It is always easier to lead an ordinary life, rather than being engaged and unafraid of expressing your own opinion, isn't it? But after visiting the “Welcome to Hard Times” exhibition at the DOX gallery in Prague, you will not have the option of remaining indifferent anymore. Under the leadership of the Dutch designer and photographer Erik Kessels, 600 square meters of the exhibition hall have been turned into a huge gym, where a conversation with the visitor is held on urgent topics – migration, terrorism, ideological and religious confrontation, and misinformation in the media – in a humorous form. Having come there, you yourself become part of the installation.
There is always a story behind everything. What is the story behind your exhibition? I was already a little bit busy with this kind of work. Last year I did an exhibition called “Jump Trump,“ which was like a large mat of several square meters with Trump‘s portrait on it, and people could actually climb onto a height and jump onto his face. So I think that in most installations or in exhibitions there’s not a lot of visitor reaction to what is going on, so I decided to change that. There was also an exhibition earlier called “Welcome to Capitalism!” (in the DOX also), so then came the idea of calling the new one “Hard Times,” and finally I had the idea of calling it “Welcome to Hard Times.” Just to make a gym out of it and to combine these art things with
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the problems of wealth. In fact, when you have a large space like this one in the DOX gallery, you can really rebuild it into a gym, and really come here not only for a physical workout, but for a mental workout. Which one of the problems that you’ve pointed out do you consider to be the toughest to resolve? Maybe there are also some which are fake? There are no fake problems here. The fact is that there’s a growing failure of cooperation among countries, and among politicians, and the public. All this is increasingly dividing and separating people from each other, and this exhibition tries to close the gaps a little bit by confronting them and also helping people to work on them.
