Erik Kessels, Dutch artist, curator and communication designer, will explain the so-called “found photography” technique that has made him an international reference. 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.
Starting with his most recent projects, the artist will show that through an alternative use of images even the everyday can become extraordinary.
The talk will be introduced by Francesco Zanot, curator of Foto/Industria, a biennial photography exhibition on industry and labor, which featured Kessels among the protagonists of the 2023 edition at Palazzo Magnani.
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Erik Kessels is a Dutch artist, curator and communication designer and he is Creative Partner of communications agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam and London since 1996. 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).
From 2017 his mid-career retrospective is shown in Turin, Düsseldorf, Budapest and he exhibited recently in the SFMOMA. He was called “a visual sorcerer” by Time Magazine and a “Modern Anthropologist” by Vogue (Italia).