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 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.

I think lots of it has to do with the media, they massage us, it’s all about how quickly everything becomes normal, and also about how the media have injected fear into us. In that way it’s kind of bizarre, that people are more and more busy with physical effort than with protesting or talking out loud.

Do you consider your exhibition to be a work of contemporary art, or is it just an expression of your own mind and inner thoughts?

That is a good question, because I think even in the modern art world everything needs to be categorized, you know. Like this is a sculpture, this is a painting, this is an artist... I mean for me this is just an installation.

It is also a museum, a gym, so you can call it whatever you like. It could be many things, but the purpose is clear, to provoke the public by saying: «Listen, if you go to a gym, you don’t have to say so much to each other, there are no questions in a gym, there’s just a workout. But maybe here you will have questions after you leave, won’t you?»

Do you think that you are influenced by the media also? To what extent?

Of course. We get more and more influenced in the sense that there is no escaping it anymore, to escape, maybe you would have to live in the countryside and have no television, but! But we are now bombarded with information.

People are becoming like editors. Every morning you have to decide what to see, what to read, what to hear, what to listen to, and you have to make selections about that, otherwise you go crazy. But even apart from that, whatever you see, whatever you look at, there’s a repetition of it the next day, because your news feeds get pumping with it.

It works in a simple way: if you look at something they think you’ll also want to see it or something like it the next day, which is probably not true at all. We are getting more and more infected by that. On the one hand, there is not so much wrong with that, but on the other hand, the people who have all the power, they totally benefit from it. You know, if you look at the situation in America and how everybody there just does this. People are getting tired of all these random decisions by Trump. It’s a bizarre moment in time when this can happen. Just look at it: something happens, but if you can’t 100% prove it, then it’s not true.

So how to find the truth? When you are a media specialist you have a chance to compare facts, to find out interconnections and to detect the real version. But if you do not, what then?

There is no answer to that. Well, maybe the answer is that we are too far from this to see anyway, because the moral understandings of many people have faded in a certain way. Maybe we go to the gym to forget all of it? Getting back to the exhibition – it’s a mix of roles we are playing. It’s a boiling thing. An exhibition like this is much more difficult to do because it’s a provocation. It’s not comforting. It’s disturbing.

About disturbing – how do you fight against negative emotions in daily life?

I still have my creativity, so I can create things which are a little bit like plaster on the wound of negativity, so that is maybe what I do, but I have to say it becomes more and more difficult. I think it is the same for a lot of people. There’s so much negativism and inequality in our life that you just need to look for positive things, just to balance it.

Photography is one source of balance for you?

Exactly. And also humor – you need that, you have to work on it. There are enough serious things going on around us. But I live with the feeling that I can create some positive things even from the negative. This exhibition – it’s not heavy, it is more about light and irony anyway, and that is what is nice about it.

There are several unique projects presented in the “Welcome to Hard Times” exhibition: a multimedia project by artist Elinor Milchan from Israel, and interactive installation by Cuban-American artist Antuan Rodriguez (curated by Marisa Caichiolo) and a collection of sculpture by Slovak artist Viktor Frešo.

The exhibition in the DOX gallery will run until February 4 th

, 2019.

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