Talk - Erik Kessels: Storytelling with vernacular photography

In the framework of the exhibition « Reality Check » of the European Month of Photography

Over the past 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 an artist 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.

In this talk Kessels will show how the everyday can be extraordinary and how to work and story tell with the re-appropriation of images.

Another subject of this lecture is the role of images in the time we live in and how you can look at these in other ways than simply consuming them.

Erik Kessels is a Dutch artist, curator and communication designer, with great interest in art and photography. Erik Kessels is since 1996 Creative Partner of communications agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam and London.

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As an artist and curator Kessels has published over 100 books of his 're-appropriated' images and has written the international bestseller Failed It! and Complete Amateur.

He has taught and is teaching at several Art Academies (Amsterdam, Milan, Toronto, Lausanne, Düsseldorf).

Kessels made and curated exhibitions such as Loving Your Pictures, Mother Nature, 24HRS in Photos, Album Beauty, Unfinished Father and Shit. Currently he’s working on a long-term European art project called Europe Archive (www.europearchive.eu).

Mediator: Erik Kessels

Duration: 1h

Language: EN

Age: For adults

Free of charge | Subject to availability | Registrations will open from 15.03.2025.

More information on www.konschthal.lu

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